On 26 August 2014 at Nieuwegein near Utrecht in the Netherlands, Tjibbe Joustra, the chairman of the DSB, informed relatives of the victims of what progress the investigation had made. The Dutch Safety Board released a preliminary report based on information gathered from various sources in September; this showed that the aircraft had been in full operating condition and that no technical malfunctions had been reported. The salvaged fight recorders had not been tampered with and their data revealed that there had been no engine or aircraft system warnings prior to the crash. At the time of the event the plane was flying in unrestricted airspace at a height that was deemed safe from ground attacks. Absolutely no distress messages whatsoever were made by the MH17 crew and, in view of this, the DSB concluded that the moment of impact must have been very sudden. Photographs taken of the damage to the fuselage and cockpit suggested multiple impact points from ‘high-energy objects outside the aircraft’. Damage to the aircraft wasn’t consistent with any known failure of the aircraft’s engines or its systems. Flight MH17 had evidently broken up in the air with different parts of the plane ending up in multiple locations.
Numerous experts claimed that the damage described by the safety board was consistent with the impact of a Buk missile that exploded as it crashed into the plane or just before, its shrapnel destroying the target. The DSB refrained from specifically referring to a Buk missile impact in its preliminary report; for the time being that was just a theory and they would not support it until they could prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.
All through the summer months the separatists and Ukrainian forces battled with each other while the DSB investigators were forced to wait endlessly for the situation to stabilise to such an extent that they could carry out their work in an acceptable manner. Former Australian defence force chief Angus Houston was coordinating the Australian response to the disaster. Multinational police teams, including unarmed Australian Federal Police, at different times sent out a team in advance; but often they could only make it halfway down the road, and sometimes three-quarters of the way, before the shelling started again and they were forced to return.
No one could point the finger at who was responsible for the shelling, although the Ukrainian government assured everyone that it wasn’t them. If this was true then that left the question of who the separatists were targeting and why. No one provided an answer. There were reports that the remains of many MH17 victims might still be lying in the war-torn area.
It was October and the Australian government was by now getting increasingly frustrated by the situation. A G20 summit planned for November and to be held in Brisbane was fast approaching, and Putin had let Australia know that he would be attending. The countries forming the G20 had decided by consensus that Russia should not be sidelined at the summit.
Paul Guard—whose parents, Toowoomba doctors Roger and Jill Guard, were killed in the MH17 crash—said little would be achieved by Putin staying away: ‘It wouldn’t achieve much by uninviting him because dialogue is the way forward and I hope the G20 might be a good platform on which to strongly voice our disapproval of his government’s policy and approach to Ukraine.’
Tony Abbott took a slightly different approach, saying: ‘I am going to shirtfront Mr Putin—you bet I am—I am going to be saying to Mr Putin Australians were murdered, they were murdered by Russian-backed rebels.’ (The rest of the world had to have explained to it what a shirtfront involved—it is a term from Australian Rules football, in which two players confront each other chest-to-chest and attempt to bump each other out of the way without using their hands.)
But before the leaders met at the G20, Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, attended a summit of European and Asian leaders in Milan and took the opportunity to approach Putin, who was seated opposite her. ‘President Putin, I’m Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister,’ she told him. Her aim was to talk to him about the MH17 and Russia’s lack of cooperation. As the two moved away from the tables out of range of the microphones, Bishop managed to talk to Russia’s leader for about ten minutes. During Bishop’s intervention, Putin’s piercing blue eyes never left her face. When she was finished, he said, ‘So this is what you call a shirtfront?’, referring to Tony Abbott’s threat. Bishop said that she wouldn’t quite use that phrase and would herself refer to it as a ‘diplomatic buttonholing’.
When Abbott and Putin did meet later on, there was little sign of any ‘shirtfronting’ by Prime Minister Abbott. The two leaders discussed matters without any apparent friction.
On 4 November 2014, the DSB at long last received clearance to visit and examine the wreckage site. It was the first opportunity that was deemed sufficiently safe. Up to now there had been criticism from the bereaved at home: why was it taking so long? Media footage showed that large groups of journalists, officials and even families of the victims had visited the crash site weeks before. It was hard for them to understand, but for the DSB the safety of their investigators was vitally important.
The first team to enter the area was to prepare plans for the team that would be charged with collecting the wreckage of Flight MH17. There were of course new delays, and the actual recovery work at the crash site began on Sunday 16 November 2014. It had been a nail-biting three and a half months for the teams, but now they could finally do the work they had been itching to do for such a long time. Although they were already in possession of valuable data—such as the flight recorders, photographs and air traffic control information—salvaging the wreckage was considered key in finding the answer to the cause of the crash.
Work at the crash site remained a risky business. Escorted by the local armed police, the investigators wore bulletproof vests and their work was restricted to daylight hours only. The time they could spend on site was highly uncertain because hostilities could flare up again at any moment. The whole mission could be aborted at any given time, and this knowledge strongly influenced the way the investigators went to work and the choices they made while they were in the field. Their priority became finding and securing the most relevant pieces of wreckage and loading them onto a waiting vehicle. A list was made of the pieces of wreckage that were most important. At the site, however, it became apparent that several relevant parts of the wreckage had by now disappeared.
Most of the cockpit could be pieced together though, and those fragments revealed that the front of the cockpit had suffered most from the impact. The explosion had struck close to the captain’s seat. What exactly had hit the MH17 could still not be proven beyond reasonable doubt, but the view was firming that this could have been a Buk, or some kind of sophisticated surface-to-air missile capable of targeting an object cruising at an altitude of 32,000 to 33,000 feet.
Observed, and sometimes bullied, by the armed men who were supposed to protect them, the investigators went about their work as best they could. The guards were especially wary of why some wreckage parts that were loaded onto the trucks were considered important and constantly demanded that the investigators explain their reasons for loading certain shards of metal. When the guards wanted to know why a particular cylindrical object was being loaded onto the truck, the team only shrugged their shoulders and said it was a motor part that could be of assistance to them. In reality the investigators had just carefully loaded a piece of what they suspected was the outer shell of a Buk missile.