More pressure on Putin

A Pro-Russian rebel who calls himself "Novorossiya", or New Russia, tweeted on Sunday that the black box flight-data recorders from the downed Malaysian airliner had been taken to Donetsk in rebel-dominated eastern Ukraine.

Sergei Kavtaradze, a senior official of the pro-Russian rebels' self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, refused to comment on the Twitter posting.

Britain will try to persuade other European nations at an EU meeting tomorrow to ratchet up sanctions on Russia over the downing of a Malaysian jet carrying 298 people, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Sunday.

Ukraine has accused Russia and pro-Moscow rebels of destroying evidence to cover up their guilt in the shooting that has intensified the showdown between the Kremlin and the West.

"We will . . . try to get our European partners to agree to go further in terms of sanctions if Russia hasn't radically changed its position by then," Hammond said.

Hammond had previously said that Russia could end up in international isolation if it did not use its influence over the rebels to secure safe access to the crash site for international investigators.

"Russia risks becoming a pariah state if it does not behave properly," he said.

EU leaders last week agreed to sanction some Russian companies and block new loans to Russia by multilateral lenders, but the measures were less stringent than those the US announced at the same time.

"Some of our European allies have been less than enthusiastic and I hope that the shock of this incident will lead to them becoming more engaged, more willing to take the actions necessary to bring home to the Russians that when you do this kind of thing it has consequences," Hammond said.

He said that information at hand strongly pointed to the conclusion that the plane had been shot down from territory held by pro-Russian separatists by a missile supplied by Russia.

"The Russians have influence if not direct control over these people," he said. "They have been supplying them, they have been supporting them, they have been providing them with succour.

"They cannot deny their responsibility for the acts that these people are carrying out."

Hammond said it was essential that Russia cooperate fully with international air-crash investigators and hand over all evidence in its possession.

He spoke of Russian "obfuscation and obstruction" regarding the events that led to the plane's downing.

Railway workers said on Sunday that bodies from the crash site were loaded into refrigerated wagons at a station in the town of Torez, 15km away.

A Reuters witness said he could see five grey trucks at the station, one of which appeared to have the refrigeration switched on.

"It's corpses. They brought the bodies overnight," said a duty officer at the Torez station.

The railway wagons, he said, were to be transported "in the direction of Ilovaisk", a town further to the east, towards the border with Russia.