Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash: No forensic investigators, co-ordination or body bags as Ukraine locals are left to scour gruesome scene

This corner of Ukraine is woefully ill-equipped for the aftermath of a disaster of this magnitude

Cahal Milmo London Independent

 

 

In the ripening sunflower fields of Rozsypne a hellish harvest was reaped today. As a rag-tag column of off-duty coal miners, police and emergency workers filed through the towering blooms, an occasional shout was heard - the remains of another passenger from flight MH17 had been found.

For some, the task was overwhelming. One volunteer fainted upon discovering a corpse. Elsewhere, a draped coat or a piece of clear polythene was all the dignity afforded to the 298 souls who had been making themselves comfortable barely two hours into the long flight to Kuala Lumpur and were now to be found mutilated, scattered across six square miles of eastern Ukraine's fertile plains.

The aftermath of the explosion which dismembered the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 in mid-air on Thursday afternoon has turned the area between the two villages of Rozsypne and Hrabove, some 25 miles from the Russian border, into a sprawling charnel house. Dozens of bodies fell into crop fields, some into houses, in this sparsely-populated region which today was largely devoid of the modern paraphernalia the world has come to expect to descend upon the aftermath of an aviation disaster.

Where there should have been investigators and rescuers clad in forensic suits conducting a fingertip search, there were helmeted coal workers, their faces still blackened by the dust of their last shift, and Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen picking through crops and an only spasmodically guarded debris field.

Where there would have been body bags and a temporary morgue, villagers and volunteers used whatever came to hand in the summer heat - a blanket, a sheet weighed down by stones or, more often, nothing apart from a stick cleaved from the surrounding shrubs and planted in the ground with a strip of red or white material to denote another lost life.

The management of the scene of an apparent mass murder was every bit as rudimentary as a corner of Europe which is an effective warzone could muster. The human consequences of what took place inside the cabin of MH17 at about 3.15pm on Thursday were consequently laid brutally bare.

In Rozsypne, Irina Tipunova described, like many other villagers, how the air had been filled with the sound of an explosion and then an unimaginable rain of human bodies falling from the sky, including one - an unidentified woman - through the roof of her home.

The 65-year-old pensioner said: "There was a howling noise and everything started to rattle. Then objects started falling out of the sky. And then I heard a roar and she landed in the kitchen, the roof was broken."

The naked body of the MH17 passenger was today still lying inside the house, beside a bed. Ms Tipunova said: "The body's still here because they told me to wait for experts to come and get it."

Another villager, in her 20s, added: "I opened the door and I saw people falling. One fell in my vegetable patch."

Footage unthinkable for broadcast in most jurisdictions but no less freely accessible via a basic internet search paid grim testimony to every type of damage that the explosion on board the Malaysian Airlines jet at 33,000ft did to its human cargo.

Many of the dead remained strapped into their seats, fully clothed and apparently undisturbed by the violence of their passing. One witness described a ten-year-old boy for whom the only evidence of the trauma of his final moments was the look of fear frozen onto his face.

Amid the wreckage of the main impact point - a long strip of blackened field punctuated by lumps of airframe and the exposed blades of MH17's Rolls Royce Trent engines - the scene owed more to the imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Bodies had been charred beyond recognition by the heat of fires on impact which were ferocious enough to liquefy parts of the aluminium fuselage. While many were grotesquely maimed - as local resident put it "I've never seen anything like it - you look down and see ears, fingers, bones" - others were strangely untouched and intertwined.

John Wendle, a freelance photographer who was among the first on the scene, told Channel 4 News: "I saw the bodies of a man and woman tangled together - as if they were hugging. They must have been sitting together. There was a whole line of bodies stretching away. There were between a dozen to two dozen bodies just off the road and it looked like that had been arranged."

Others remarked on how passengers had been randomly stripped of clothing in their journey to the ground - one man still wore his Nike trainers but no trousers, another clad only in his socks. One child wore a t-shirt with the words "Don't Panic".

In the words of one Ukrainian separatist fighter at the scene, it was as if they had been "undressed by the air".

Here and there, single flowers had been placed on bodies and their coverings by villagers still numbed by the events of the previous 24 hours.

Ultimately, however, it was not the bodies which explained the tragedy of MH17 - and the brutality of its demise - but the possessions that surrounded them.

A cuddly toy monkey - the unpicked stitching on its nose offering evidence of just how much it had been loved by its owner - most probably belonged to one of the 80 children on board. An airport novel in Dutch, its 14-euro price sticker still on its cover and sitting alongside a barely-thumbed Lonely Planet guide to Bali, bore testimony perhaps to carefree holiday plans.

Close by, the contents of a backpacker's rucksack had spilled to reveal amid the clothing and sandals two shrink-wrapped pork sausages and what appeared to be a "Happy Birthday" paper garland.

In among this contrail of personal possessions came countless items of identifying documentation - car rental agreements, boarding passes, medicine bottles and passports.

It was a measure of the chaotic oversight of the crash scene, in which residents and journalists were allowed to freely roam, that police began collecting passports found in one section of the wreckage before being told to stop in case their removal hampered the identification of surrounding corpses.

What passes for officialdom in this corner of Ukraine - a 45-minute drive from the rebel stronghold of Donetsk and out of Kiev's control for at least three months - was woefully ill-equipped for the disaster that has turned its agricultural heartland into killing fields. The only infrastructure by the crash scene - where the cockpit fell some six miles from the tail section - is a poultry farm.

Denjen Doroschenko, an Australian-Ukrainian journalist interviewed at the crash scene, lost his temper on air after a militiaman intruded on the area.

He shouted at the man: "You don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be here because you don't know how to look after a crash site. So bugger off!"

In this heartland of pro-Russian sentiment, it did not take long nonetheless for the finger of blame to be pointed at the government in Kiev and its perceived Western supporters.

While the outside world held the use by rebels of a Russian-built surface-to-air missile as the most likely explanation for the catastrophe, the preferred theory at the scene was an attack by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Only a few, on condition of anonymity, were prepared to acknowledge the existence of a Buk self-propelled missile launcher in the area.

Igor Girkin, a local pro-Russian military commander who had appeared to acknowledge his forces shot down the Boeing 777 in a Facebook posting later deleted, was tonight quoted in the Russian media suggesting that the jet had been deliberately loaded with corpses and crashed to damage the rebel cause.

Such spurious and desperate stuff was evidence that, for the moment at least, even the horrors of MH17 had not dimmed the appetite of the separatists and their backers for further conflict.

As if to underline the point, the slowly intensifying effort at the crash scene took place to a soundtrack of small arms fire and the thud of Grad missile launchers as both sides continued to seek victory at an increasingly bloody cost.

The Ukraine

Of Planes and Proxies
 

Posted by Jon Lee Anderson The New Yorker

A day after a Malaysia Airlines jet was brought down over eastern Ukraine, President Obama placed the blame squarely on the area’s Russian-backed separatists. "We don’t have time for propaganda," he said. "We don’t have time for games."

One of the games being played in the region is an old and dangerous one: the proxy war. For a power that wants to meddle in another country, the great thing about fielding surrogates is that they give you deniability. The bad thing is that you can’t ever fully control them. Things were problematic enough in the nineteen-sixties, when the C.I.A. hired mercenaries to fight Soviet proxies in Africa and Latin America. The formula was simple: here’s a down payment, in money or arms. Go in and do your worst, and you’ll get more if you get something done. If you screw up, get caught, or get killed, we’re not involved. But, even with that protective distance, these kinds of agents could create terrible mischief, which often found its way home. When I was in Bolivia in the mid-eighties, Argentine pilots told me that the C.I.A. was hiring fliers to drop arms to the Nicaraguan contras. The pilots had a friend, recently employed by an infamous drug lord, who had just signed on. Later, it emerged that some of the contras had made a side deal with Pablo Escobar, the drug trafficker, allowing him to ship cocaine through their network of clandestine airstrips.

During the early Cold War, the West’s more infamous mercenaries—such as the Briton (Mad) Mike Hoare and the Frenchman Bob Denard—generally operated in backwaters, like the Congo or the Comoro Islands. Because there was little oversight, the powers that hired such characters rarely suffered much for their transgressions. In 1961, the U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash, on the border between Northern Rhodesia (now called Zambia) and the Congo, where he was attempting to resolve a bid for secession in the copper-rich Katanga Province. Many people believe that, rather than suffering a mechanical failure, the plane was shot down by Belgian mercenaries who supported the secessionists. But the official inquiries were inconclusive.

In the nineteen-eighties, the C.I.A. handed out Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the mujahideen fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, and, again, the thinking seemed simple enough. By giving these rustic fighters—who had begun their resistance with century-old Lee-Enfield rifles—the means to blast airplanes out of the sky, the West could covertly shift the war in their favor. The Stingers were effective, and soon the Soviet Army—which had enjoyed unhindered aerial dominance, thanks to its Hind helicopters and MIG jets—began to suffer. Scores of aircraft were shot down and, in 1988, nine years after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they began to withdraw in defeat. By then, however, the C.I.A. had become nervous about the Stingers, fearing that the sophisticated mobile weapons it had handed out could be used against American interests. The Soviets and the Americans had both recently shot down civilian airliners by accident (KAL Flight 007, in 1983, and Iran Air Flight 655, in 1988, respectively), and so the risks to aviation posed by irresponsible proxies seemed very real. The Agency initiated a covert program to buy the Stingers back— with less than total success. In early 1989, in rural Kandahar, a mujahideen commander who owned two Stingers mistook me for a C.I.A. field agent, and said, "Tell your people I am not giving them back, ever." But the jihadis whom the West supported eventually provided a different kind of blowback, thanks to Al Qaeda’s use of passenger jets themselves as weapons.

For decades, the Libyan despot Muammar Qaddafi fielded his own proxies in fights across Africa and beyond. The Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal) was on his payroll at one point. Qaddafi’s agents planted explosives aboard a Pan Am jetliner that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988; a year later, in similar fashion, they blew up a French civilian passenger plane as it flew over Niger. When Qaddafi was deposed, in 2011, a motley group of "revolutionaries," including some whom he had supported, swarmed into Libya and looted his vast armories. Among the weapons were large numbers of Russian-made heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles. Peter Bouckaert, of Human Rights Watch, documented hundreds of them in unguarded caches, but, by the time weapons inspectors arrived, the missiles were gone. Where they are today, nobody knows. But Libya has become a hotbed of warring militia groups and jihadi extremists, and it seems likely that, sooner or later, the missiles will find a use.

In Ukraine, where ethnic-Russian separatists have been waging a violent insurgency against the pro-Western government, there is a great deal of evidence that Putin has played a spoiler’s role from the start, proclaiming his innocence while not so covertly arming the rebels, and placing Russian intelligence and military officers in the field to help direct the violence. In the past few days, the rebels have shot down two Ukrainian military aircraft in the same area where the Malaysian jetliner was flying when it was blown up, with two hundred and ninety-eight passengers on board.

Characteristically, Putin was quick to lament the loss of life; he released a photograph showing him and Russian Cabinet members standing for a moment’s silence to honor the dead. Later in the day, he said that the incident was Ukraine’s fault. But by then evidence was emerging from multiple sources, including cell-phone intercepts, strongly suggesting that Putin’s rebels had done it. They still deny it. It may have been a hideous mistake made by fighters accustomed to firing on anything that appears in the skies above—and equipped with the means to do it. But, however it played out, this sort of tragedy is a natural consequence of giving weapons to violent men who feel that their powerful sponsor allows them to commit crimes with impunity.

Putin has been using the Ukrainian conflict to revive the notion of Russia as a superpower. Until now, his proxies—first his "little green men" in Crimea, and then the separatists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic—have provided him a thin veil of deniability. Now, though, he may have provided for his own blowback, and sooner than he might have guessed

MH17: Ukraine accuses pro-Russia rebels of taking bodies from crash site

 

Kiev says pro-Russia rebels have removed bodies from crash site with help from Moscow, and are trying to destroy evidence   

Kate Hodal in Kuala Lumpur, agencies in Grabovo and Tania Branigan in Beijing  
 
Link to video: Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash site integrity may be compromised, says Malaysia  
Ukraine's government accused pro-Russia rebels on Saturday of removing corpses from the MH17 crash site and destroying evidence.
"Terrorists brought 38 bodies to the mortuary in Donetsk," the government statement read, adding that Russian experts would presumably perform autopsies. "The terrorists are seeking for the heavy load trucks to carry the plane wreckage to Russia," the statement added.
A rebel, who identified himself as "Grumpy", neither confirmed nor denied the claims that bodies had been moved to Donetsk. "Maybe they did it, maybe not," he said. "I personally didn't do that."
On Saturday the rebels fired several shots in the air to prevent journalists from approaching to bodies at the crash site. They also fired the warning shots at OSCE monitors on Friday to prevent them from approaching the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines flight.
The security of the crash site, outside the village of Grabovo in eastern Ukraine, is crucial to preserving evidence that will determine who and what brought the airliner down, but talks between Kiev and rebels who are in control of it have so far failed to establish a buffer zone where international investigators can work, or to give them access.
The head of Ukraine's security service, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, said in televised remarks on Saturday that talks had agreed a 20km security zone around the site "so that Ukraine could fulfil the most important thing – identify the bodies hand them over to relatives". A senior official of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic, however, said no agreement had been reached.
A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Michael Bociurkiw, also said he was not aware of any agreement, and reports from the scene said there was no security zone.
A team of nearly 30 OSCE observers attempted for second time to gain access to the crash site on Saturday after meeting resistance from armed rebels on Friday. The monitors were allowed to view one part of the site under escort.
Aleksander Borodai, prime minister of the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic, denied rebels had touched the crash site but said it would move the bodies for "humanitarian" reasons and called on Russia to help. "Bodies of innocent people are lying out in the heat. We reserve the right, if the delay continues ... to begin the process of taking away the bodies. We ask the Russian Federation to help us with this problem and send their experts," he said.
Workers at the scene have recovered more than 180 bodies, which have begun to decompose under the summer sun. All 298 on board the plane were killed in the crash.
Malaysia's transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, called on the UN on Saturday to assist with a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine and ensure that investigators have safe access to the crash site so they can remove bodies as quickly as possible. Anything less would be inhumane, he said.
Investigators from the Netherlands, home to 192 of the victims, arrived in Kiev overnight. A team from Malaysia, home to 44, is also in Ukraine. The Malaysian transport minster is to join the team and attempt to gain access to the site.
Six investigators from the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch are also to join the growing international investigation. The UK Foreign Office has sent extra consular staff to Ukraine and the Metropolitan police are liaising with international partners to send specialist officers to assist with the recovery, identification and repatriation of those killed. The dead include 10 British nationals.
There is growing international condemnation of pro-Russian separatists over the incident, with Washington pointing the finger of blame at the militias. The Pentagon confirmed a surface-to-air missile fired from territory controlled by separatists brought down the plane, but stopped short of accusing Russia of supplying the weapon.
In the UK, Downing Street said it appeared increasingly likely that the catastrophe was the result of a surface-to-air missile fired from near rebel-held Torez.
The Australian prime minster, Tony Abbott, repeated his assertion on Saturday that all evidence suggests that the missile came from an area controlled by Russian-backed separatists, using equipment likely supplied by Russia.
At a charged UN security council meeting on Friday the US ambassador, Samantha Power, said the US "cannot rule out technical assistance from Russia" while the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Moscow "places all blame on Kiev".
Barack Obama on Friday said the circumstances of the crash, which came at the end of a week in which pro-Russian separatists claimed to have shot down Ukrainian military aircraft, suggested some Russian assistance to the rebel forces.
"We don't yet know exactly what happened with respect to Malaysia Airlines, although obviously we are beginning to draw some conclusions given the nature of the shot that was fired. There are only certain types of anti-aircraft missiles that can reach up 30,000ft and shoot down a passenger jet.
"Set aside what's happened with respect to the Malaysian airliner, a group of separatists cannot shoot down military transport planes or, they claim, shoot down fighter jets without sophisticated equipment and sophisticated training and that's coming from Russia."
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who has avoided discussing the issue of responsibility, said on Saturday that he hoped "a fair and objective probe will be carried out to establish the truth as early as possible".

Russia Denies Role in Downing of Airliner

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and KEITH BRADSHER NY TIMES

GRABOVO, Ukraine — As rescue teams slowly converged on the grisly scene of the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet, the Russian Defense Ministry on Friday denied any involvement in the missile strike that Ukrainian officials said ripped the Boeing 777 from the sky on Thursday, and many began questioning why the airline had chosen to fly a civilian jet over a combat zone.

The crash site was still unsecured by midday Friday, raising questions about who controlled the flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder and other onboard devices that could help determine exactly how the crash occurred. Rebel spokesmen said they had recovered most of the devices, but it was unclear when and to whom they would turn them over for investigation.

Russian officials were adamant that they had nothing to do with the disaster, continuing to point fingers at the Ukrainian government and military. "In view of various types of speculation concerning operations of the Russian armed forces in the areas bordering Ukraine, we affirm that the anti-aircraft means of the Russian armed forces did not operate in that region on July 17," the Defense Ministry said in a statement posted on its website.

After a Malaysia Airlines jet crashed in Ukraine on Thursday, several amateur videos were posted online.

The statement also said that its air force was not flying within Russia in the areas bordering Donetsk on Thursday.

Officials in the United States confirmed late Thursday that Flight 17, with 298 people aboard, had been shot down over Grabovo, Ukraine, by what they described as a Russian-made antiaircraft missile. Fighting in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists has been marked by the successful use of missiles against aircraft at higher and higher altitudes. The downing on Thursday of Flight 17, struck at 33,000 feet, was the first at cruising altitude for modern commercial jets, however.

The Russian defense statement noted that units of the Ukrainian Army possessed the BUK M1 air defense missile launchers that officials said were most likely responsible for bringing the jetliner down. Much of the speculation surrounding the crash has focused on that system, particularly since the pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine bragged on social media in late June that they had taken possession of a BUK system after capturing a Ukrainian military base.

The crash remained the subject of intense debate in the small Ukrainian town of Grabovo, as residents tried to come to grips with what had unfolded in the fields where they work, just yards from their homes.

Two villagers said quietly that they had seen the flash of a rocket in the sky around the time the plane went down. Victor, who said he was too afraid to give his last name, said that he had been in his garden at the time and that he had seen "the light coming from a rocket."

He said it had come from the direction of Snizhne, a city where the Ukrainian military has been bombing rebel positions frequently for more than a week. "It was a rocket, I’m sure of it," he said.

The other villager, Sergei, 15, who also did not want to give his last name, said he had been swimming in a nearby river when he saw what appeared to be a rocket being launched into the sky. He said he then jumped out of the water, hopped on his motorbike and sped home.

As a cloudy dawn came, the full horror of the field was on display. Small white pieces of cloth dotted the grassy farmland, marking the spots of bodies.

Four rebels in fatigues were wandering through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings and riffling through guidebooks and bags.

When asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military.

"This wasn’t ours," said a rebel who identified himself only as Alexei, standing looking at an overhead bin in the grass with a rifle over his shoulder. "Why would we do this? We’re not animals."

The smell of flesh hung heavily near a broken hulk of metal on the road where a body lay splayed. A foot with part of a leg was lying on the road.

The plane appeared to have broken apart at a great height as pieces were scattered across several miles of agricultural fields. The two wings lay akimbo, as if pushed forward on impact. The plane was full of fuel when it crashed and the fire near the engine was fierce, turning the twisted metal remains into molten pools that had hardened by morning.

"This is direct provocation of the E.U. and the U.S.," said a rebel, Alexander Nikolaevich, who was walking along the road near the scene. "You see our weapons," he said pointing to his aging gun. "We started to win the war and the fascists did this to stop us."

When asked if the fight would continue, he said, "a little bit."

In Malaysia, the heavily Muslim nation in Southeast Asia, people mourned on a holy Ramadan Friday, shocked at the sudden loss of a second Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200. Many began questioning why the plane was flying over a conflict in eastern Ukraine where increasingly powerful surface-to-air missiles were being used.

In a statement delivered before dawn in Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia pointedly noted that the International Civil Aviation Organization had declared the airspace safe and that the International Air Transport Association had not restricted travel there. "We must — and we will — find out precisely what happened to this flight," he said.

Peppered with questions about the aircraft’s route during a news conference late on Thursday afternoon at a Kuala Lumpur airport hotel, Liow Tiong Lai, the Malaysian transport minister, said repeatedly that the aircraft had been following a safe route that Malaysia Airlines had used for many years and that was still used by most Asian airlines and by many European airlines, including on the day of the crash. "During that period of time, there are also many other aircraft using the same route," he said.

European and Ukrainian air traffic controllers had continued to route civil flights over the contested area even as the fighting worsened — and even as flights directed by Russian air traffic controllers had apparently started to avoid it.

Ukrainian intelligence has pointed to a fighter named Igor Bezler, the militia leader in the eastern town of Gorlovka, as saying in an intercepted phone call that his men had "shot down a plane" on Thursday. Several assassinations are believed to have happened under Mr. Bezler’s watch soon after his forces took Gorlovka, and he took responsibility for killing a number of Ukrainian militiamen in the town of Volnovakha some weeks ago.

According to Russian Internet sources, Mr. Bezler was born in 1965 in Crimea, and studied in Russia. He served in the Russian military but moved back to Ukraine in 2003, where he began to work as the head of security for a factory in Gorlovka. Biographies also note that he had worked in a company that performed burial services but was fired in 2012. He has been wanted by the Ukrainian authorities since April 2014.

Mr. Bezler’s nom de guerre is Bes, which in Russian sounds like the first syllable of his last name, but also means demon. There are rumors that Mr. Bezler does not get along with other militia leaders, and that he has had street battles with the Vostok Battalion, though rebels have dismissed those allegations.

In a slickly produced video called "Heroes of Novorossii," the name of the self-declared insurgent region, Mr. Bezler was shown wearing a light blue beret. He had blue eyes and a long mustache. In a recent interview with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, he claimed to be holding 14 Ukrainian soldiers hostage and said that the Ukrainian military had fallen apart, "much like the condition of the Russian military in the early 1990s."

In the interview, Mr. Bezler said he was a Russian passport holder but had a residency permit in Ukraine. He said he sang the national anthem of the Soviet Union every morning, and usually went to bed around 10:30 p.m. He confirmed that he had worked as head of security for the Gorlovka factory, and claimed that he was fired from the burial services company over a fight with the local mayor who he said was demanding bribes.

Peter Marosszeky, a longtime aircraft engineer and former senior executive at Qantas, PanAm and American Airlines who advised Boeing on the development of the 777 aircraft, said in a telephone interview that the 777-200 had an extremely long range and would have enough fuel to divert around a dangerous area during a 12-hour flight if the pilots chose to do so. But he said that airlines have typically not worried until now about surface-to-air missiles reaching planes at cruising altitude, because only a very large missile with a lot of fuel could ascend such a distance.

Mr. Marosszeky expressed skepticism that militiamen could readily fire such a large missile without training as well as cooperation from whoever owned or manufactured the missile. "You’ve got to have special codes and so forth to operate these things," he said.

　

Questions about why commercial air traffic was continuing in the area — and about when air traffic should be stopped over similar areas of fighting in the future — could prove difficult to answer. The investigation into the loss of Flight 17 is laden with potential disputes over sovereignty.

Mark A. Dombroff, a partner focusing on the aviation industry at McKenna Long & Aldridge, a national law firm in the United States, said that legal precedents indicated that if a plane is downed by military action, the lead country in the investigation is the one over whose territory the plane was shot down. That appears to be Ukraine in this case — but the rebels in eastern Ukraine, where the plane crashed, do not recognize the leadership in Kiev and may try to claim the lead role in the investigation.

"One of the most complicated factors is getting investigators on the ground in hostile territory," Mr. Dombroff said.

Ukraine or the rebels — or both — could decide to transfer leadership of the crash investigation either to the country of registry of the aircraft, which would be Malaysia, or to the country of manufacture of the Boeing 777, which would be the United States.

Alexander Borodai, the prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, the main separatist organization, said the group was setting up a committee to investigate the crash, the news agency Interfax reported. Russian government officials continued to emphasize the official line Friday that the investigation was under Ukrainian jurisdiction.

Leading a crash investigation is in some ways a formality for developing countries, as most of the world’s investigators with crash experience tend to come from countries that manufacture aircraft and certify their airworthiness. Russia’s proximity to the crash site, close ties to the rebels and extensive aviation experience means that it could try to play a sizable advisory role, particularly if the rebels follow through on reported plans to locate the flight data recorders and send them to Moscow.

The crash is another setback for Malaysia Airlines, which has already been struggling to recover from the loss of Flight 370, which vanished on March 8 during a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The enduring mystery over Flight 370 has already severely hurt demand for Malaysia Airlines tickets, forcing the airline to offer budget carrier prices even though it bears the costs of a full-service airline.

The financial penalty on Malaysia Airlines seemed clear on Friday morning when two planes, one from Cathay Pacific and one from Malaysia Airlines, left Hong Kong International Airport five minutes apart, both bound for Kuala Lumpur. The Cathay Pacific flight was sold out in every class of service, and was so overbooked that the airline took the unusual step of calling at least one passenger at home the night before and telling him that he had been involuntarily bounced to the flight operated by Malaysia Airlines, with which Cathay Pacific has a shared marketing code.

By contrast, the Malaysia Airlines flight was at least one-third empty. The bulk of the passengers appeared to have come from two separate companies that were holding meetings in Kuala Lumpur and had bought blocks of tickets at discounted prices for their employees.

Both Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines have confirmed that they have not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3.

"We detoured our flight because of political instability there," said Lee Hyo-min, a spokeswoman at Asiana, which had been flying a cargo plane through Ukrainian airspace once a week from Brussels to Incheon, South Korea, until that point.

Korean Air Lines had been sending 42 passenger and cargo flights per month through Ukrainian airspace, but those flights had been rerouted, beginning on March 3, company officials said.

Civilian jetliners have been shot down on a few previous occasions, including by the United States. The U.S.S. Vincennes used a pair of surface-to-air missiles in 1988 to destroy Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 people, when the ship’s radar operators mistakenly concluded that the plane was descending toward them in a possible attack. A later review found that the jetliner was ascending at the time. It had been following a flight path that Iranian F-14 fighter jets had used in the preceding days to approach the American vessel, before veering away when warned by radio.

In 1983, a Russian Air Force fighter jet downed a Korean Air Lines flight that was traveling from New York City to Seoul by way of Anchorage, after the plane wandered off course.

Chinese fighters shot down a Cathay Pacific airliner in 1954 off the coast of Hainan Island, southern China, in an incident that had its roots in a civil war. China’s explanation at the time was that it had feared the Cathay Pacific plane was a military aircraft belonging to the nationalists on Taiwan, who had lost the civil war in mainland China but who were technically still at war

A Master of Illusion Endures

For Woody Allen's Next Trick, Shrugging Off Bad Publicity

By DAVE ITZKOFF NY TIMES

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The cafe here on Westminster Street that was the location for a future Woody Allen movie looked like an elaborate stage illusion, surrounded by large screens that focused light into the restaurant, while also concealing any action within from onlookers outside.

In time, Mr. Allen will raise the curtain on that particular act, starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix. But for now, that trickster was keeping it hidden, emerging from his protective barriers only to talk about another motion picture, "Magic in the Moonlight," which opens July 25.

Written and directed by Mr. Allen, this comedy tells the tale of a 1920s stage magician (played by Colin Firth) whose sober belief in the empirical world is sorely tested by an enticing younger woman (Ms. Stone) who claims to be a psychic medium.

Issues of artifice and uncertainty are pervasive in Mr. Allen’s work and life. "Magic in the Moonlight" is the latest of his films to exhibit his fascination with the early 20th century and to offer a philosophical arena where the forces of rationality and spirituality can duke it out, though it is no secret which side the author favors.

"I’m like Blanche DuBois," said Mr. Allen, 78, sitting on an ice chest in a parking lot outside the cafe. "I hope in life that there’s a certain amount of magic. Unfortunately, there’s not enough. There are little, sporadic things one could think of as magical. But for the most part, it’s grim reality."

Those remarks may simply reflect the comically crushing skepticism of Mr. Allen, who has considerable power to construct his own worlds, fictional and otherwise.

But the comments could also apply to the tumult of recent months, when he was confronted with past accusations he may have thought had vanished; and the reality that "Magic in the Moonlight" may test whether his audience has disappeared.

Magic — the form that has worked in Mr. Allen’s favor — has appeared in his movies in various guises, whether overtly, as in films like "Scoop" (the 2006 film in which he played a fumbling would-be Houdini), or obliquely, as in the 1985 comedy "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (in which a movie character stepped off a screen into real life).

In his adolescence, Mr. Allen said, he was obsessed with stage magic and taught himself card tricks and sleight-of-hand stunts, even performing them for small audiences. But, given what he called "my inherent criminal personality," Mr. Allen said, "I was interested in being a gambler, a card hustler, a dice hustler."

"It was aiming to a life of borderline crime," he added.

Letty Aronson, Mr. Allen’s sister and longtime producer, said from the set that her brother’s early interest in prestidigitation was a sign that he was "very, very observant of small things that happen in everyday life."

But there was a mischievous side to Mr. Allen’s magic act, too. When Ms. Aronson asked him for the secret of a certain knife trick, she recalled: "He said, ‘If you give me $5, I’ll sell it to you.’ So I gave him $5. I never got the knife, and I still don’t know how it was done."

As a filmmaker, Mr. Allen has been a vocal disbeliever in a world beyond what is perceivable, as certain that there is no foundation for it as he is that such faith could never take root in him, though he holds a certain fascination with those who possess it.

"But if you’re the kind of person that finds it hard to deceive yourself — even though it’s seductive to believe the other thing — then you’re stuck with it," he said. "The overwhelming amount of logic and evidence is that we’re all victims of a bad deal."

The trials that Mr. Firth’s character undergoes in "Magic in the Moonlight" — he badly wishes Ms. Stone’s psychic is not a fake, and even resorts to prayer in a desperate moment — might seem to indicate that Mr. Allen is more flexible about his beliefs than he is willing to acknowledge.

Mr. Allen denied this, though his leading man thought it was plausible.

"Woody must at least understand that certainty is to be questioned," Mr. Firth said in a telephone interview. "Sometimes there are more paradoxes in good writing that are revealed about the person than they might consider."

Mr. Allen as a magician in "Scoop." Credit Focus Features/Photofest

As further evidence, Mr. Firth cited a favorite line from Mr. Allen’s short story "The Condemned," a pastiche of Camus-style existentialism: "Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak."

Mr. Firth said: "You can actually read a lot into that. You can escape and escape, but there are things in the world, hard facts and cause and effect, that you cannot deny."

A streak of escapism might also account for Mr. Allen’s frequent return to pleasant depictions of the pre-World War II decades, the setting not only of "Magic in the Moonlight" but also of "Radio Days," "Bullets Over Broadway" (the film and the Broadway musical), "Zelig" and others.

Mr. Allen said this seeming preference was more like pragmatism — the most logical time when these stories would take place — and he said he was not a nostalgic person. "Nostalgia is a trap," he added. "It’s a pleasant, sticky substance, like honey, that you fall into."

(Ms. Aronson, his sister, affirmed that he had no real desire to exist in the past. "Believe me, he could not live in those days with no air conditioning," she said.)

But other close observers of Mr. Allen’s work were skeptical of this claim.

David Thomson, The New Republic film critic and author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," described Mr. Allen as "a major-league fantasist, in which he is the central figure," adding that this was "entirely laudable and maybe necessary in an artist."

"His mingling with attractive actors and actresses has been an immense fantasy inspiration to him," Mr. Thomson said of Mr. Allen.

"We know, as much as we know anything about him, that he cherishes the world of those old movies," Mr. Thomson said. "And yet he clearly recognizes you can’t bring it back. It’s a much chillier age today. You feel he’s pained by that."

These fanciful renderings of bygone eras are surely more comfortable than the period this past winter, when Mr. Allen was publicly challenged by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, who said in The New York Times and in other publications that Mr. Allen sexually molested her when she was a child.

In an Op-Ed article in The Times in February, Mr. Allen wrote, "Of course, I did not molest Dylan," saying that a police investigation had cleared him at the time and adding that the piece would be his "final word on this entire matter."

Here in Providence, Mr. Allen dismissed the possibility that lingering outrage could affect the public’s interest in "Magic in the Moonlight."

"No thoughts like that occur to me," he said to this reporter. "They only occur to you guys."

"I don’t think anyone has ever not come to a film of mine that they thought they would enjoy," he added. "Nothing keeps them away if they think they’ll enjoy the film. And if they don’t think they’ll enjoy the film, nothing we can do ever brings them in."

Ms. Aronson agreed it would be "sheer stupidity" for Mr. Allen’s fans to avoid his future films. "If they like Woody Allen movies, what are they doing?" she said. "They’re not hurting him. They’re hurting themselves."

Asked if the recent scrutiny weighed on Mr. Allen, Ms. Aronson said: "No, not at all. And I think this year’s rehashing of everything made everything so much more obvious."

Whatever people want to believe about Mr. Allen, "there’s nothing you can do," she said. "You just move on and go on with your life, which is what he’s done."

A publicist for Ms. Stone said she was unavailable for comment.

Mr. Thomson said that Mr. Allen’s "annus horribilis was some time ago" — that is, when he separated from Mia Farrow in 1992 and the sexual-abuse claims against him were first made.

"I don’t have the impression that it threw him off stride very much," Mr. Thomson said.

Professionally, Mr. Allen still enjoys wide latitude to make movies as he wishes. His last three directorial efforts, "Midnight in Paris" (which sold $151 million in tickets worldwide), "To Rome With Love" ($73 million) and "Blue Jasmine" ($97 million), are among his most lucrative movies ever, with "Blue Jasmine" earning its lead actress, Cate Blanchett, an Academy Award.

Mr. Allen said that his next four films, including the currently untitled one he is making with Ms. Stone and Mr. Phoenix, have financing, and he has the full support of Sony Pictures Classics, which has released his recent films, including "Magic in the Moonlight."

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, said: "Every detail of what we do, he sees, he looks at, he approves. He still has a lot to say, and this process that he has allows him the comfort to say it exactly the way he wants to."

Mr. Barker declined to comment on how he thought the recent controversy might affect the performance of "Magic in the Moonlight."

Thoughts of winding down his career do not occur to Mr. Allen, who described his work as if it were a mixture of fantasy and vacation.

"You go in, in the morning, and there are women like Scarlett Johansson and Emma Stone that you spend months with," he said. "They’re charming, they’re beautiful, they’re gifted. The guys, like Colin, like Joaquin, are larger than life. They’re delightful."

Should he simply one day run out of ideas, Mr. Allen suggested, he could still fall back on his old sleight-of-hand skills.

"I could probably cheat some old ladies out of their pensions, if I had to," he said.

Ukraine Rebels Are Retreating for Last Stand

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN NY TIMES

KIEV, Ukraine — Separatist rebels retreated Monday from positions in eastern Ukraine, apparently blowing up bridges, and began building barricades in the two largest cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, in anticipation of a final stand against advancing government troops.

While separatist leaders have complained bitterly about being sold out by their allies in Moscow, Ukrainian officials said Monday that they had succeeded in sealing the previously porous border with Russia, stopping the influx of new weapons and fighters.

The action on Monday came after a series of surprising successes by Ukraine’s underequipped and underfunded military, which in recent days has driven the rebels from some strongholds that were seized early in the three-month rebellion. It has accomplished this without encountering strong resistance or a reaction from Moscow.

Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, called off a cease-fire last week and vowed to defeat the rebels on the battlefield. But that has raised the prospect of protracted and bloody urban warfare with significant civilian casualties.

Mines near an armored personnel carrier destroyed Monday by government forces near the city of Slovyansk, Ukraine. Credit Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who warned last week that he would not stand by while the safety of Russians was endangered, did not comment on the deteriorating situation. That was left to the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who complained about damage to civilian areas but mentioned nothing about possible military action. The Kremlin appears to have taken that option off the table, in favor of a negotiated settlement that might install close allies of Russia as the governors of Donetsk and Luhansk.

"A quick end to the bloodshed is in our common interest," Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. "We believe that there can be no excuses, pretexts for postponing the immediate end of the shooting, as a result of which more peaceful civilians suffer, the outflow of refugees multiplies and civilian infrastructure is destroyed."

In an apparent bid to slow the oncoming troops, the pro-Russian insurgents blew up two bridges on the road to Donetsk from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, two long-occupied provincial cities where rebels were ousted over the weekend after a fierce bombardment.

At the same time, Ukrainian officials said their troops were setting up blockades to isolate separatists in the cities. "The points of access to these cities are being blocked so that militants are not delivered weapons or manpower or other resources," Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said at a briefing in Kiev.

Although the military has made substantial gains in recent days, analysts warned that battles in the big cities could represent an entirely different and awful chapter, involving dangerous urban warfare and potentially high numbers of civilian casualties. Rebel forces have appeared to make a strategic calculation to abandon other positions and fall back into the urban centers, said Oleksiy Melnyk, a security analyst at the Razumkov Center, a policy research institute in Kiev.

"It’s in their advantage to get into the big cities, because the options of the government forces will be even more limited," Mr. Melnyk said. "They can’t use artillery, aircraft."

Donetsk is a city of one million, Luhansk of more than 400,000, although large numbers of civilians have been fleeing, terrified of being caught in the hostilities.

Late Sunday, Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, issued a plea that his home city be spared destruction. "Donetsk must not be bombed," Mr. Akhmetov said. "Cities, towns and infrastructure must not be destroyed."

Such destruction, however, was already underway. In addition to the road bridges, in the villages of Zakitne and Seleznevka, rebels destroyed a railroad bridge in the village of Novobakhmutivka, leaving a freight train dangling. In all, seven bridges were destroyed, Ukrainian officials said.

Calling the situation in eastern Ukraine worse than in Belgrade ahead of the civil war that broke apart Yugoslavia, Mr. Lavrov urged the resumption of peace talks with the inclusion of representatives of the militants from the east.

Negotiations have faltered since Mr. Poroshenko called off the cease-fire, saying it was playing into the rebels’ hands. An abridged session in Kiev on Sunday involved representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but Mr. Lavrov described it as pointless without the participation of militants, who he noted could not travel to the capital "for obvious reasons."

Echoing Mr. Lavrov, the German government on Monday issued an urgent plea, calling for a rapid, unconditional and mutual cessation of hostilities, and said it was urgent to organize talks that included the separatists. However, in a television interview, the deputy chief of staff of Mr. Poroshenko’s administration, Valeriy Chaly, said Ukraine would follow its own course.

"How to solve the situation in the country — it is our sovereign right," Mr. Chaly said.

As all sides braced for fighting in the main cities, in Slovyansk it was clear that even if government forces prevail, the city faces a long recovery from the physical and emotional damage of what has effectively become a vicious civil war.

On Monday afternoon in Slovyansk, Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, stood under a statue of Lenin, promising to bring the "terrorists" to justice and restore basic services to the city by the end of the day.

Residents greeted him with questions about reconstruction and compensation for damage as a light mist coated the central square. Some shed tears at the mere mention of running water.

"What kind of future is there for Ukraine?" one elderly woman in a blue plastic poncho asked the minister.

"A beautiful one," Mr. Avakov said, flashing a smile.

But beauty was nowhere to be found in Slovyansk, where broken glass, severed electrical cables and a wasteland of unexploded mortar shells define the landscape. Control came at the expense of untold destruction.

Outside a gold-domed church on the northern edge of the square, Ukrainian soldiers distributed water from the back of a truck. While thirsty residents accepted the aid, their attitudes toward the new armed arrivals were decidedly mixed.

Sveta Zinovyeva, 17, spent the end of her school year holed up in a basement with her family. She said she had read romance novels to distract from the "horrible fear.""We can’t forget this," she said. "What did we do to them? What did we do?"