MH17: BARBARIANS AT THE GATE

CORPSES bloat and the stench ripens. In July, it is sunny and warm in east Ukraine. The occasional rains hasten decomposition, and this draws another kind of army: the flies.

Relatives worldwide watch the reports. Their loved ones are the casualties of a war of which they never enlisted. It is a no-man’s land without precedent. These are the stories that ought not need to be told, about souls doomed to a badlands of peasantries and pillages. Here, their deaths are treated as an unfortunate distraction.

Men in big boots stomp through wheat fields. Their balaclava-clad heads poke through sunflower crops. A man is seen lifting a ring and putting it in a plastic bag. Piles of clothes and children’s toys are heaped next to pieces of luggage that did not blow open on impact.

An armed pro-Russian separatist gestures as he blocks the way to the crash site of MH17.

An Australian journalist early to the scene checks wallets on the ground: none contains money. In Malaysia, Cameron Dalziel’s widow Reine is cancelling his credit card because it is being used in Ukraine.

In the Netherlands, relatives ring the mobile phones of lost loves. They are answered by men with thick accents. Each successful connection is another show of disrespect, another call of the wild.

An extended internet news report circulates. The footage depicts limbs at ragdoll angles. What it does not show is almost as terrible. Where are the protocols? Bodies lie uncovered, it seems, except when villagers scrunch up plastic sheeting.

Wreckage in a field of sunflowers

The viewer’s anger swells: is the provision of the barest dignity too much to spare for these barbarian troops? For here the bodies will stay, untended, while separatists menace official observers and shellfire rumbles in the distance.

The crime is one abomination. The cover up — under the gaze of the western world — is another.

Ukrainian State Emergency Service employees sort through debris.

THE Russian separatists take possession of at least one of the two black boxes by Friday, but deny possession for another day or so. Footage suggests one of the two instruments thudded down in a wheat field. Black boxes are critical to any plane-crash investigation. They hold flight-path details and cockpit conversations.

Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and members of a forensic team inspect a refrigerator wagon containing remains of victims from MH17 at a railway station in the eastern Ukrainian town of Torez.

So, too, is the crash site, which, in this case, spreads across 35sq km or more, and is being trampled by troops, farmers and journalists — pretty much anyone in the first few days except international crash investigators who seek to preserve the scene from contamination.

There is initial talk of a local ceasefire: conflicting reports dispel any Western assumptions that this would be a given. The MH17, for the first of many times, is being cast by local powers as a sideshow to bigger preoccupations.

Again, we can thank the Ukrainian security service for apparent phone intercepts that help explain the black box discoveries. A separatist battalion leader, Alexander Khodakovsky, says two recording devices are being held by the head of intelligence of the separatists’ military commander.

A piece of the wreckage of MH17 is pictured in a field near the village of Grabove, in the region of Donetsk.

That commander has orders — no outsiders, including a nearby international observation team, are to get hold of the material. Khodakovsky says he is awaiting instructions on the black boxes from “our high-placed friends … in Moscow”.

It is Malaysia that announces, with pride, that it has secured access to the black boxes after extensive negotiations with Alexander Borodai, the denim-loving president of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The boxes are unveiled from a white plastic bag. Borodai bowls up to a press conference, a study in nonchalance. “Here they are, the black boxes,” he reportedly says.

By now, after three days, bodies are suddenly being carted away. As are plane parts, for no good reason. The remains are stored in four train trucks in Torez, about 15km from the crash sites. They are refrigerated by a locomotive, but not soon enough for an inspection team engulfed by the smell in the absence of protective gear.

Rin Norris (in black hat) and Anthony Maslin are joined by friends in grieving the loss of their three children, Evie, Mo and Otis.

Sinister images multiply, from the armed guards and their German shepherds, to the passer-by clutching at her nose. Ukraine monitors say the separatists have taken the bodies at gunpoint. US Secretary of State John Kerry is outraged: “Drunken, I mean, literally drunken separatist soldiers are piling bodies into trucks unceremoniously, and destroying evidence and disturbing the pattern that is there.”

There are said to be 282 bodies on the train. This becomes 200, a more reasonable estimate given Dutch investigators — as well as others — report bodies still on the ground. A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Michael Bociurkiw, notes the lack of recovery activity.

The OSCE has been on site since the day after the crash (it has been in the area observing for months, and members have been kidnapped by splinter separatist militias). It has been kept at a distance, sometimes with guns, but Bociurkiw has seen odd changes in the wreckage’s appearance.

The Maslin children, Evie, Mo and Otis, 10yo who were killed in the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

Plane parts seem to have been sliced into. Members have observed the cockpit section being cut by uniformed men with a power saw. The tailfin looks different. Others see a crane lifting plane parts. A van tugs at wreckage with a rope. Angle grinders whirr.

From far-off capitals of the world, where notions of process matter, educated observers toss out their diplomatic rule books. “What we have seen is evidence tampering on an industrial scale,” says Prime Minister Tony Abbott. President Barack Obama is just as direct: “What exactly are they trying to hide?”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives are more knotted than a simple power grab over Ukraine.

Armed pro-Russian separatists block the way to the crash site.

Luggage at the crash site.

-News.com.au