Ukraine urged to guarantee safe access to plane crash site

 (Vatican Radio) Australia and the Netherlands have urged Ukraine's government to ensure that its military offensive against separatists will not threaten an international mission to recover human remains from the area where a Malyasian Airlines plane was shot down.  Officials said at  least eight civilians had been killed by fighting in the area since Sunday. 

Regional correspondent Stefan Bos reports:  

Kyiv acknowledged on Monday that troops took more territory from pro-Russian rebels near the site where Malaysian flight MH17 was brought down. Officials said two rebel-held towns, Torez and Shakhtarsk, had been recaptured and the army tried to take the village of Gorlovka, near the launch site of the surface-to-air missile that shot down the airliner, killing all 298 people on board.

But fighting prevented international investigators and police again from reaching fields, where victims human remains lie under sweltering heat between aircraft debris. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said that she and her Dutch counterpart Frans Timmermans would discuss access with Ukraine's government. 

“We'll be seeking assurances that any military action doesn't compromise our humanitarian mission," she told reporters in Kyiv.

"And also [we want] that they abide by the terms of the U.N. Security Council resolution, that sought a ceasefire. We understand yesterday that there was fighting within the exclusion zone. So we need a reassurance that the exclusion zone will remain and that there will be a ceasefire so that we can carry out our work," the envoy added.     

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay made clear on Monday that the downing of the plane by suspected pro-Russian rebels may be a war crime. Her office also said at least 1,129 people had been killed and 3,442 wounded in Ukraine's fighting as of Saturday.  More than 100,000 have fled the violence since April.

The U.N. said there had been an alarming build-up of heavy weaponry in civilian areas of Donetsk and Luhansk and warned all sides that such attacks could violate international humanitarian law. Weapons seen by international monitors included artillery, tanks, rockets and missiles that are being used to inflict increasing casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.