GRABOVA, Ukraine --The roads to the crash site are awful, but through the five checkpoints to the site of the Malaysian airlines crash this morning, we encountered surprisingly little resistance from separatist soldiers. The crash site sits in the middle of golden fields of wheat, the peaceful, bucolic expanse scarred black. In one place, the wreckage still smolders.
From what we have been told, there are two different debris fields. The primary site is approximately one square kilometer. Here we found the remains of the fuselage and the wing and, among the wreckage, carelessly tossed bodies and luggage of the civilians on board.
I have never seen anything so horrifying. Here amid the broken bits of plane were twisted bodies, dismembered corpses and flattened flesh. Some were missing pieces of clothing. There was very little left; the most human component of the scene was the banal possessions of those on board.
An asphalt road stretches across this flat plain and, when we got there, different groups of people were milling around. Some teenagers and older men clustered around a few houses at the edge of the field, talking to press and smoking. Emergency services had set up tents, but there was little they could do, given that all the passengers on the plane had died.
Though they carried weapons, soldiers did little to patrol the area. Both soldiers and emergency service personnel refused to talk to the press. What looked like a group of miners walked down this long, straight road as if on a vigil, seeming to mourn the dead. They, too, refused to speak to the press.
The political implications of this tragedy are grave. And even this solemn place was not free from politics: the self-proclaimed Governor of Donetsk, Pavel Gubarev made a brief appearance to address journalists, arguing that the separatists did not have the weaponry to take down this aircraft.
Gubarev urged caution, encouraging the international community to reflect on their response and saying he didn't want the conflict to escalate into an international engagement. “You should have experts from various countries confront the Ukrainian government...to ask them why they are promoting this confrontation with Russia," he said. "Once we get objective information, then we can approach the matter in an unbiased way.”