Putin must facilitate full access to MH17 crash site

RUSSIA deserves harsh sanctions if it vetos the UN resolution.

SAYING “all the right things”, as Tony Abbott reports Vladimir Putin did in their telephone conversation, is a start. But the real test for the Russian leader will be whether he makes good on his words. Until he does, the international community must be unrelenting and united in pressuring the Kremlin to force it to deal properly with the events surrounding the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 and its appalling aftermath.

Mr Putin cannot wash his hands of the responsibility he bears. One command from him, as the full extent of the tragedy became apparent last Friday, would have compelled the hoodlums in Eastern Ukraine who pass themselves off as pro-Russian separatists to behave differently. He had the power then, as he does now, to order them to secure the crash site and allow access to Ukrainian and international emergency workers and investigators. The remains of the victims needed to be treated with respect and dignity instead of being left strewn across fields decomposing in the European summer. Mr Putin’s self-serving preoccupation was to try to shift blame for the attack on to Ukraine. As a result, the bodies of men, women and children were mishandled and their possessions plundered. The international community watched in horror as the crash site became what the Prime Minister aptly described as “more like a garden clean-up than (the scene of) a forensic investigation”.

Faced with international uproar, Mr Putin has tried to shift ground. After his conversations with Mr Abbott and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who warned him he had “one last chance” to do the right thing, he said he wanted to “provide security for the international experts on the site of the tragedy”. It’s late in the day and the damage has been done. His proxies removed or destroyed vital evidence, but the international community must, nonetheless, hold Mr Putin to his word.

An immediate test of his intentions will be the vote in the UN Security Council on the Australian resolution demanding the pro-Russian separatists allow “full and unrestricted” access to the crash site. Russia, as a permanent Security Council member, has the power of veto. Mr Putin would be extremely unwise to use it.

If he is to salvage anything of his reputation from the global revulsion his delinquent handling of the MH17 crisis has brought him, he must support the resolution and do everything he can, through his control over the separatists, to assist forensic experts and scientists from Australia and elsewhere charged with identifying and repatriating the victims’ remains.

Mr Putin’s choice is between following the laws, standards and expectations of the civilised world or pursuing a path that condemns Russia to the status of a rogue state. The assurances he has given Mr Abbott hopefully indicate the outrage over MH17 is having an impact. Intensified economic sanctions, strongly backed by US President Barack Obama and European leaders, must be an immediate option if Mr Putin fails to do the right thing.