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Ukraine’s Defence Ministry has claimed that two of its military jets were shot down yesterday in the east.
The Sukhoi Su-25 fighters were shot down over an area called Savur Mogila.
Defence Ministry spokesman Oleksiy Dmitrashkovsky said the planes may have been carrying up to two crew members each.
The separatist Donetsk People’s Republic said in a statement on its website that one of the pilots was killed and another was being sought by rebel fighters.
While the rebels deny having missiles capable of hitting a jetliner at cruising altitude, rebel leader Alexander Borodai has admitted that separatist fighters do have Strela-10M ground-to-air missiles which are capable of hitting targets up to an altitude of 11,500 feet.
In fighting on the ground, rebel leader Pavel Gubarev wrote on his Facebook page that his men had retreated from the villages of Chervona Zorya and Kozhevnya, on the Russian border about 30 miles from the scene of the crash.
In the Netherlands, two military transport planes carrying 40 coffins bearing victims of the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 landed in the southern city of Eindhoven.
Six days after the Boeing 777 was shot down over the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, the first bodies finally arrived in the Netherlands, the country that bore the heaviest toll in the crash that killed all 298 passengers and crew.
Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch said that Dutch authorities had delivered the plane’s voice and data recorders to the agency’s base at Farnborough in southern England, where information will be downloaded.
Experts will also check for signs of tampering, while Dutch officials said they have taken charge of the stalled investigation into the airline disaster and pleaded for unhindered access to the wreckage.
US officials claimed the plane was probably shot down by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile fired by Russian-backed separatists.
But the intelligence officials were cagey in their assessment, claiming that while the Russians have been arming separatists in eastern Ukraine, the US had no direct evidence that the missile used to shoot down the passenger jet came from Russia.
