THE HAGUE: Sending Western forces to secure the MH17 crash site in rebel-held Ukraine and protect investigators will be a perilous balancing act involving unpredictable separatists and Russian pride.
“It’s going to be a dangerous tightrope act,” defence analyst Justin Bronk told AFP, referring to a Dutch and Australian push to put troops on the ground where the Malaysia passenger jet was shot down on July 17.
Both countries, whose citizens accounted for three-quarters of the 298 who were on board, say they have readied police officers to deploy and were seeking the legal mandate to do so.
“They want to use as few lightly equipped troops as possible to avoid provoking the Russians,” said Bronk, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Bear in mind, part of the reason that this whole conflict started is over Russia’s view that the West, in the guise of both Nato and the EU, are coming ever further eastwards,” he said.
“At the same time, to ensure their protection they will want to send them with quite heavy equipment, given the equipment both sides are firing at each other in the region.”
US experts believe the Malaysia Airlines jet was mistakenly shot down by the pro-Russian separatists with a sophisticated surface-to-air missile provided by Russia.
International investigators from eight countries, including Russia, have yet to gain access to the vast crash site amid security concerns.
“If the situation suddenly deteriorates, we have no extraction capacity,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, which lost 193 people in the disaster, told parliament yesterday.
“We have no soldiers on the ground.”
The UN Security Council, including Russia, on Monday passed a resolution backing an independent investigation of the disaster, and the Netherlands and Australia are reportedly drafting a new resolution to send an armed force to secure the crash site.
Australia, which had 28 citizens on board, is sending around 200 police and an unspecified number of troops “on a humanitarian mission” to secure the crash site, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced yesterday. — AFP