While dozens of innocent people get shot in cities like Luhansk and Donetsk in the Eastern Ukraine every day, while currently restaurants and the Institute of Culture and Arts in Luhansk are on fire, citizens are hiding in basements – most targeted by the Kiev government looking for rebels, the rebels the Ukrainian government are looking for are overwhelmed and incapable to deal with an additional disaster on hand.
In addition both government and rebels are now facing a new enemy. A group called the Battalion Luhansk or “diversion group” are bandits trying to steal and rob. Like the Ukrainian military, they also shoot people randomly and put buildings on fire. Rebels and government are both unable to secure anything- and chaos rules.
The task securing the crash site of the Malaysian airline plane shot down is impossible to master. This may count for the government as well as for unorganized rebels that operate without a real chain of demand and leadership.
Many bodies with victims of the MH17 crash in Eastern Ukraine were put on a refrigerated train and left for Donetsk. Donetsk is under rebel control by Ukrainian separatists . Some of the rebel fighters involved in securing corpses appeared to be teenagers and drunk not understanding what they are really doing or ordered to do.
The train — which has five refrigerated carriages carrying the corpses — has departed from Torez about 15 km from the crash site. Reportedly the train is heading for rebel stronghold Donetsk, according to the Associated Press. Other media reported the destination for the train is
remains unclear. A Dutch diplomat has suggested the bodies could eventually be identified in the Netherlands.
The scene today was a picture of chaos.
OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw described the stench at Torez station, where armed separatists were guarding the grisly cargo of corpses, as “almost unbearable”.
The bodies, some dismembered and charred, had been rotting in cornfields amid the blackened piles of mangled wreckage of the plane at the main crash site in Grabove, with debris spread out for kilometres.
Possessions of the victims were also all over the ground: suitcases torn open, passports, books, children’s toys.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman yesterday said 192 bodies and eight fragments had been loaded onto the train by Ukrainian emergency services.
That number includes more than 30 bodies that were taken by rebel forces to Donetsk but then returned.
Another 27 bodies and 20 fragments are to be put into another refrigerator and loaded onto a second train along with any other bodies that are recovered.
Ukrainian deputy PM said the government would reveal where the train was going once militants allowed it to leave Torez.
“We will inform you when we get it from them,” he said through a translator.
“Then international experts and Ukrainian experts will meet that train. When we have information we will tell you when, how and where to.”
