Pro-Russian rebels stand guard as investigators work at a the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo), east of Donetsk, yesterday.
AFP/Kiev
Ukraine sought yesterday to avoid a political crisis after the shock resignation of its prime minister, as fighting between the army and rebels close to the Malaysian airliner crash site claimed over a dozen more lives.
President Petro Poroshenko called on parliament to heed “cold reason” and pass a vote of confidence in the government, a day after premier Arseniy Yatseniuk stepped down in fury over the collapse of his ruling coalition.
Yatseniuk’s resignation piles on more woes for a country already struggling to cope with a chaotic situation in the rebel-controlled east, where international experts are carrying out a complex investigation into last week’s downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 that killed 298 people.
The grave challenges facing the country, where 230,000 people have fled fighting according to the UN, go beyond its borders, as Washington accused Russian troops of firing artillery across the border on Ukrainian forces.
The United States has already accused Moscow of supplying the missile system it believes was used by pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine to shoot down MH17.
It said late on Thursday that it had evidence that Russia was planning to “deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers” to the insurgents.
Both Russia and the rebels deny the accusations, and Moscow hit back yesterday, dismissing the US claims as a “smear campaign”.
A truce has been declared in the vicinity of the vast crash site in rebel-held Grabove, where experts say some remains of the victims still lay decomposing under the sweltering summer heat more than a week after the tragedy.
Dutch authorities said 189 coffins have been flown to the Netherlands where the remains would be identified, with another flight set to carry 38 more from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv to Eindhoven today.
Foreign ministers from the Netherlands and Australia attended a ceremony at Kharkiv airport, as both countries said they are seeking to deploy troops to the site.
European monitoring organisation OSCE said its representatives as well as those from Ukraine and Russia are due to hold a video-conference with rebels controlling the site to discuss the deployment of such an international mission.
The Netherlands, which is leading the probe after losing 193 citizens in the crash, said troops had been consigned to barracks and had leave cancelled ahead of a possible mission to secure the site.
Australia, which lost 28 people, said it already has 90 police in Europe ready to deploy and said that it also plans to send troops.
“This is a humanitarian mission with a clear and simple objective: to bring them home,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. “All we want to do is to claim our dead and to bring them home.”
As the scramble to salvage the victims dragged on the impact of the crash continued to reverberate across the globe and the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) called together world aviation officials for a high-level meeting on Tuesday to discuss lessons learnt from the incident.
The government’s offensive to regain control of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland was given a boost yesterday when its forces took the strategically-important city of Lysychansk.
At the same time, it reported losing 13 soldiers in the past 24 hours, while local authorities in the region of rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk said 16 people have been killed.
The bloody insurgency has forced 230,000 people to flee their homes, the United Nations said, including 130,000 who have sought refuge in Russia.
While the civil war rages on in the east, politicians in Kiev were locked in a fierce debate over Yatseniuk’s abrupt resignation, with the UDAR (Punch) party of boxing champion Vitali Klitschko insisting that the premier stay on until early parliamentary elections are held.
Together with a few other parties, UDAR announced on Thursday that it was leaving the governing coalition – a move that sparked Yatseniuk’s resignation and appeared to fire the starting gun for a rancorous campaign ahead of possible legislative polls expected this fall.
The Fatherland faction of ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko condemned the coalition’s collapse, saying that it “opens up a second front” in the country as it battles to quell the insurgency in the east.
“Between peace and chaos, Ukraine unfortunately is choosing political chaos,” said the party in a statement read out by one of its lawmakers in parliament.
