Even amid newfound tragedy, the truth remains as contested as ever in eastern Ukraine.
This article was updated at 11:05 a.m. ET
Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters
An account from the Ukrainian armed forces in the country's war-torn east of Thursday's plane crash jibed with the flight path as it was tracked on computer screens. Soldiers stationed in the region saw Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 pass overhead normally — "in a controlled manner," said a spokesman for the armed forces, Vladislav Seleznev — as it followed its route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Then it fell from the sky. The plane crashed near a town called Grabovo in the Donetsk region, not far from the Russian border, scattering wreckage and the remains of its 298 passengers across miles of terrain.
The plane was felled by a missile fired from the ground — that much has become clear, but not much more. All three of the parties who could have fired the shot — the separatist rebels, the Ukrainian government, as well as Russia, which has troops massed on the border nearby — denied responsibility. And a battle to establish the facts kicked quickly into full gear: Seleznev said rebels had rushed to secure the crash site and sent their own investigators. "This area is under rebel control, and Ukrainian forces don't have any access to investigate the case," he said.
He also claimed rebels had taken the plane's black box, the flight data recorder that, once the shock and horror of a plane crash settles, becomes the focus of investigators and bereft families alike as they grasp for answers. Yet even the device's fate remained unclear as a chaotic new day got underway. While some initial news reports said rebels had taken it and were sending it to Moscow, others on Friday said the black box had been retrieved by Ukrainian authorities, or at least that a second one had.
Either way, clear answers — and especially ones that might be accepted by both sides — will likely prove hard to come by. Alexander Borodai, the Russian citizen who acts as prime minister in the separatist republic rebels have declared in Donetsk, said in a phone interview that he had sent investigators to Grabovo shortly after the crash on Thursday and would perform their own inquiry. He had been to the site himself, he added. Then he issued the denial that has become the rebel narrative: that they don't have the kind of missiles that could reach the height of a civilian aircraft flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet. This would be "impossible," he said.
Self-proclaimed prime minister of the pro-Russian separatist Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Borodai ©, stands as he arrives on the site of the crash
DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP / Getty Images
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