Russia said Saturday it supports a transparent international investigation of the downing of a Malaysian airliner, but U.S. and other Western officials said they saw no evidence Moscow was seeking to impose that message on its eastern Ukrainian allies who still control the site of the crash. 
 
 “It’s another case of the Russians saying one thing and doing another,” a senior Obama administration official said. “They say they want to abide by an international investigation, but there’s more that they can do in terms of calling on the separatists to give unfettered access” to investigators still barred from the debris field. 
 
 In a telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State John F. Kerry “underscored that the United States remains deeply concerned” that international investigators were denied access, and that victims and debris were reportedly being “tampered with or inappropriately removed from the site,” a State Department statement said. 
 
 A Russian statement said Lavrov and Kerry “agreed that all physical evidence, including the black boxes, must be made available for such an international investigation and that, on the ground, all necessary arrangements must be made for access by an international expert team.” 
 
 Although the Russians said that the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization should lead the investigation, Lavrov also “stressed the importance” of including the Interstate Aviation Committee, the Moscow-based civil aviation authority established in 1991 with 11 states of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine. 
 
 The committee’s participation would give Russia access to the investigation, although no Russian citizens were among the 298 aboard the flight. A second Obama administration official said that there was no reason to exclude Russia from what is intended to be a completely open inquiry. Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to expand on publicly released statements. 
 
 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that he had called on Russian President Vladi­mir Putin to “take responsibility” for the situation when the two spoke by telephone Saturday. Putin “has to show that he will do what is expected of him and will exert his influence,” Rutte told a news conference. 
 
 Putin also spoke Saturday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who “once again” asked him “to exercise his influence over the separatists” to reach a cease-fire and begin political negotiations over the wider Ukrainian conflict, a German government statement said. 
 
 After calls with Rutte and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron said that “all three leaders are clear that President Putin needs to actively engage with the international community and use his influence on the separatists to ensure they allow access to the crash site.” There were 27 Australian citizens aboard the flight. 
 
 There is no precedent for the scale and circumstances of the proposed international investigation, and it remains unclear how the probe will be organized once access is obtained. The Netherlands, Britain and others have already sent large teams to Kiev, where representatives of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI have also arrived. Malaysia, which lost 44 citizens, is also expected to send a team. 
 
 While most attention Saturday focused on growing outrage over the delay in the investigation, Cameron’s statement also said he and Rutte agreed that the European Union “will need to reconsider its approach to Russia in light of evidence that pro-Russian separatists brought down the plane.” 
 
 Europe, which has far more extensive economic ties with Russia, has been reluctant to go as far as the United States in imposing economic sanctions against the Russians for aiding the separatists. The administration has indicated it expects the Europeans will be more willing to punish Russia if it is proved to be even indirectly responsible for the shooting down of the plane. 
 
 View Graphic Aviation history is littered with civilian planes that were shot from the sky, intentionally or not, by military weapons. Malaysia Flight 17 was cruising at 33,000 feet, more than half a mile higher than Mt. Everest, when a missile hit it July 17. And the missile’s range is believed to be more than twice that high. 
 
 In public statements by President Obama and other senior officials Friday, the administration did not directly accuse the separatists. Instead, it said that the plane was downed by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-held territory and noted that Russia has supplied the separatists with heavy weaponry, including surface-to-air missiles. 
 
 Much of the Kerry-Lavrov conversation centered on repeatedly failed efforts to impose a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine. Kerry, the statement said, “urged Russia to take immediate and clear actions to reduce tensions in Ukraine; to call on pro-Russian separatists . . . to lay down arms, release all hostages and engage in a political dialogue . . . to halt the flow of weapons and fighters into eastern Ukraine” and to allow international monitors to help secure the border. ||||| A tug of war is under way for possession of doomed flight MH17's "black box" recorder amid reports the device, which could provide the key to the crash investigation, has already been sent to Moscow. 
 
 Aviation experts said the black box, comprising cockpit voice and data recordings, would establish for certain whether the plane was shot down and where the deadly missile may have been fired from. 
 
 The data and voice recorders on Boeing 777s like the Malaysia Airlines one that crashed are among the most sophisticated in civilian use. 
 
 But as politicians including US President Barack Obama called for international investigators to be given unhindered access to the crash site it emerged it may already be too late for them to retrieve the device. 
 
 The news service Interfax reported that rebel Russian separatist forces in Ukraine had already found the black box and agreed to give it to a Russian-run regional air safety authority. 
 
 Andrei Purgin, the self-styled deputy prime minister of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, told Interfax: "Of course, we most likely will give them (the recorders) to the Interstate Aviation Committee, to Moscow. 
 
 High-level experts, who will be able to determine exactly the reason of the catastrophe, work there." 
 
 Whoever has access to the black box will have control over the information from the last moments of the flight, and they could prevent impartial investigators from analysing it. 
 
 Russian radio station Kommersant FM also reported that the black box was on its way to Moscow. 
 
 The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, said: "An international team must have full access to the crash site. And no one should interfere with the area, or move any debris, including the black box." 
 
 He said the Ukraine government had vowed to include a Malaysian team in the crash investigation, and that there would be negotiations with the separatists to establish a "humanitarian corridor to the crash site". 
 
 Former US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairman Deborah Hersman, one of the foremost accident investigators in the world, told NBC: "Finding all four corners of the aircraft, the nose, the tail, and the two wingtips, and most importantly those two recorders, the fight data reorder and the cockpit voice recorder, that's the road map they'll be looking at over the next 24 to 48 hours. 
 
 "Those two devices hold the best information about what happened in the last minutes prior to the crash." 
 
 She added: "Investigators like to identify some really critical parts first. They want to identify the origination of the break up, where that sequence started. Just like when they put together the pieces of the shuttle across multiple states, it's that trajectory your trying to take a look at." 
 
 She said the conflict in Ukraine would "absolutely" affect the investigation. 
 
 She said: "When you go into an active war zone you're concerned first and foremost about your people that you're putting on the ground. 
 
 "There's a lot going on here and it's a real challenge for anyone, but particularly for a country in a war torn area like this." 
 
 It was not clear if the US would be involved in the investigation. If Americans were confirmed to be on the plane the FBI would be expected to launch a probe. The NTSB would also be expected to investigate because the plane was built in the US. 
 
 Mr Purgin said a truce of a few days could be agreed to help with the investigation. 
 
 Mr Obama said the investigation must be must be a"prompt and unimpeded". 
 
 In a statement the White House said: "We urge all concerned – Russia, the pro-Russian separatists, and Ukraine – to support an immediate ceasefire in order to ensure safe and unfettered access to the crash site for international investigators and in order to facilitate the recovery of remains. 
 
 "It is vital that no evidence be tampered with in any way and that all potential evidence and remains at the crash site are undisturbed." 
 
 Flight MH17 had 298 people on board when it crashed near the town of Torez in Donetsk. 
 
 The US has sophisticated systems that can detect missile launches by identifying the heat from a rocket engine. 
 
 A US official told CNN one of its systems picked up a surface-to-air missile tracking an aircraft just before flight MH17 went down. The US is studying the trajectory of the missile to establish where it was fired from. 
 
 Officials in the US have yet to establish whether the weapon, believed to be a Buk anti-aircraft missile battery, was fired from the Russian or Ukrainian side of the border. 
 
 But they believe it is more likely to have been launched by pro-Russian separatists than Ukrainian government forces. 
 
 Ukraine's SBU security service have published what they said were two intercepted telephone conversations proving separatist rebels downed the plane. 
 
 The first is purported to be between Igor Bezler, commander of rebel forces in the town of Horlivka, and a man identified as Vasili Geranin, a colonel in Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. 
 
 Speaking in Russian, the voice identified as Bezler's informs "Geranin" that an aircraft has been shot down and that a team has been sent to inspect the wreckage and search for survivors. 
 
 Later, two other men – using the noms de guerre "Major" and "Greek" – are heard discussing the discovery that a "100 per cent civilian" aircraft was shot down. 
 
 "I'm only where the first bodies fell," Major tells Greek. "F***, the debris fell right in people's gardens. There are civilian things. Medicine, towels, toilet paper." The recordings have not been independently verified. ||||| Geography, motive, communications intercepts, and all manner of circumstantial evidence suggest that the likeliest suspect in the horrific deaths of two hundred and ninety-eight people aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was the curiously well-armed and well-coördinated military outfit loyal to Moscow in eastern Ukraine. Various government and intelligence officials in Kiev say that they have evidence, including a series of damning tapped conversations among pro-Russian forces, that the separatists shot down the plane, which crashed near Grabovo, a coal-mining town in the Donetsk region. 
 
 Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, said, “We are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act.” U.S. intelligence officials have told the Times and other media outlets that whoever was behind the destruction of the airliner, which was flying at more than thirty thousand feet, bound to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, likely fired a sophisticated Russian-made surface-to-air missile that was either snatched from the Ukrainian Army or supplied by the Russians. 
 
 But let’s stop here and register the proper cautions and caveats: There has been no investigation, no conclusive proof. (And there won’t necessarily be a proper and convincing investigation, either, considering the deliberately chaotic and militarized state of eastern Ukraine these days, and Russia’s clear interests.) We shouldn’t pretend to know for certain what we don’t. 
 
 What’s far more certain is that Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control. Putin’s defiant annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine inflated his popularity at home. Despite a flaccid economy, his approval rating approaches levels rarely seen beyond North Korea. But the tactically clever and deeply cynical maneuvers of propaganda and military improvisation that have taken him this far, one of his former advisers told me in Moscow earlier this month, are bound to risk unanticipated disasters. Western economic and political sanctions may be the least of it. 
 
 The former adviser, Gleb Pavlovsky, is one of the most enigmatic political actors in Moscow. Born in Odessa, he was arrested in 1982, when he was thirty-one, for illegally distributing dissident literature. He marred his reputation in dissident circles, however, when he confessed to his “crimes” and spared himself a long term in the gulag at hard labor. Instead, he was sentenced to internal exile for a couple of years in the northern provinces, where he worked as a painter and stoker. 
 
 In the Gorbachev years, Pavlovsky was the editor-in-chief of the liberal magazine Twentieth Century and the World, and after the fall of the Soviet Union he refashioned himself as a “political technologist.” For both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, he was a highly influential and darkly skillful spin doctor, a political P.R. man. Putin finally severed his relations with Pavlovsky, in 2011, but not before Pavlovsky acquired an insider’s view of a Kremlin dominated by Putin and the siloviki, members of the security forces. 
 
 When I met Pavlovsky in Moscow a couple of weeks ago, he seemed especially concerned about the lack of strategic thinking by Putin, and about the consequences of the feverish anti-Ukrainian, anti-American, and generally xenophobic programming on state television, from which nearly all Russians derive their news and their sense of what is going on in the world. 
 
 Putin’s incursion into Crimea and his manipulation of the situation in eastern Ukraine, Pavlovsky said, “was an improvisation, though the logistics and plans existed a long time ago.” 
 
 Since returning to the Presidency, Pavlovsky said, Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,” he said, expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks. 
 
 “Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public opinion and the collective political imagination. 
 
 “How can Putin really manage this?” Pavlovsky went on. “You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.” 
 
 Pavlovsky was especially concerned about one of the pro-Russian military leaders in eastern Ukraine, a former (and possibly current) Russian intelligence officer known to most by his nom de guerre, Igor Strelkov. (Strelkov’s real name is Igor Girkin.) 
 
 A wildly messianic nationalist who cultivates an air of lumpy intrigue, Strelkov has found his way to the battlefields of Chechnya, Serbia, and Transnistria. He is now helping to run the separatist operation in Donetsk. Like the radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy access to the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of disagreement with Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far enough; he has failed to invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist term for eastern Ukraine. Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his Moscow allies are as delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing that they are taking part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, or “the novels of Tolkien.” 
 
 “Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.” 
 
 If it turns out that men like Strelkov and his fellow soldier-fantasists were responsible for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and all the people on board, the fever in Russia and Ukraine may intensify beyond anything that Vladimir Putin could have predicted or desired. It is long past time that Putin ended both the inflammatory information war in Russia and the military proxy war in eastern Ukraine that he has done so much to conceive, fund, organize, and fuel. There are hundreds of corpses strewn across a field today in eastern Ukraine. What is Vladimir Putin’s next move? 
 
 Photograph: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty ||||| View Slideshow Ukrainian emergency workers carry a victim's body in a plastic bag at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near the village of Hrabove in eastern Ukraine on Monday. Associated Press 
 
 MOSCOW—Russia, in its first detailed version of events surrounding the final minutes of Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -2.22% Malaysian Airline System Bhd Malaysia RM0.22 -0.01 -2.22% Volume (Delayed 15m) : 32.44M P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap RM3.68 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee N/A 07/26/14 MH17 Crash Site Recovery Deals... 07/26/14 What's News: World-Wide 07/25/14 White House Says Putin 'Culpab... More quote details and news » 3786.KU in Your Value Your Change Short position Flight 17, dismissed accusations that pro-Moscow rebels shot down the plane, instead suggesting that a Ukrainian fighter plane or missile systems could have been involved. 
 
 President Obama speaks on the situation in Ukraine, urging Russia to compel separatists to cooperate. WSJ's Tim Hanrahan and the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute deputy director William Pomeranz join Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero to discuss. Photo: Getty 
 
 What are the next steps in the recovery of the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, and what issues do investigators face at international crash sites? Former National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall joins the News Hub with Sara Murray with details. Photo: Getty Images. 
 
 The elaborate, televised Defense Ministry presentation—at odds with Western and Ukrainian accusations that Kremlin-backed insurgents shot down the plane—came as the U.S. and Russia clashed at the U.N. Security Council on Monday. There, both countries voted in favor of a unanimous resolution that condemned the downing of the jet and called for an independent international investigation into the incident. (Follow the latest updates on the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine.) 
 
 Russia sought to use both forums to push back against growing international criticism and U.S. and Ukrainian assertions that Moscow could have provided the missile system that brought down the plane. American officials charged that the Russian version of events was a propaganda effort aimed at slowing the international community's response to the geopolitical crisis—or weakening proposed new sanctions to punish Moscow for its role in the conflict. 
 
 At the news conference broadcast from Moscow, Russian air force chief Lt. Gen. Igor Makushev didn't say outright who the ministry thought had fired the missile that apparently brought down the airliner Thursday. Nor did he provide any photographic, radar or satellite evidencethat would show a missile track. 
 
 But he said that Russian radar had spotted a second aircraft in the ill-fated airliner's vicinity just before the crash and that it was likely a Ukrainian fighter jet. A graphic that Gen. Makushev said was based on radar data depicted four commercial planes in the area shortly before the crash, as well as the alleged Ukrainian fighter jet. (View an interactive seating chart of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.) 
 
 His presentation also suggested an alternative theory, that satellite imagery showed Ukraine also had moved missile systems into the area before the incident. The air force chief presented several slides of satellite images he said showed the Ukrainian missile-system movements. 
 
 The suggested version of events echoed much of what has been reported on Russian state television in recent days, which has suggested that Ukraine could have shot down the plane, possibly via one of its fighter planes. 
 
 U.S. officials dismissed the Russian government's claim that a second plane was present when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down last week as "desperate" propaganda. 
 
 U.S. officials didn't provide their own evidence to back their arguments. But they pointed to Ukraine's statements Monday that the country's fighter jets were on the ground at the time of the crash. 
 
 U.S. officials also said that Ukrainian fighters can't operate at 30,000 feet, where Flight 17 was cruising. "The Russian government has a propaganda machine second to none, as these latest conspiracy theories demonstrate," one U.S. official said. 
 
 The Obama administration reiterated its findings that Russia was the likely supplier of advanced SA-11 antiaircraft missiles to separatists, who fired it at the Malaysia Airlines jetliner. The White House said that an international case was building that indicated Russian complicity in the tragedy. 
 
 "What's clear is that there is a picture that's coming into focus," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. "And Russian claims to the contrary are getting both more desperate and much harder to believe." 
 
 The war of words spilled over into the U.N. Security Council, where after the resolution vote, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power and Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin gave sharply different versions of who was likely responsible for shooting down the Boeing 777 on Thursday, killing all 298 people on board. 
 
 "Russia has begun to blame Ukraine itself for the attack though the missile came from separatist territory that Russia knows full well Ukraine has not yet reclaimed," Ms. Power said. 
 
 "Russia must recognize that no move on the geopolitical chessboard with the West can offset the pain being felt by the passengers' families," she said. 
 
 But Mr. Churkin chastised Ms. Power in the council chamber, saying, "There can be no jumping to conclusions or political statements here." 
 
 Mr. Churkin said Ukraine would have to answer to international investigators regarding the activities of its air-traffic controllers, why a Ukrainian antiaircraft missile battery in the area of the crash was "hastily removed," and why Ukrainian radar was operating "at an all-time high" on the day of the incident. He also accused Ukraine of "touching up" intercepted phone calls of rebel commanders with audio from before the date of the crash. 
 
 Kiev has dismissed Russian claims that it could have been involved, and Ukraine's security service has posted intercepted phone calls that it says are of pro-Russia rebel commanders discussing having shot down a plane they discovered afterward was a civilian aircraft. Moscow and the rebels have denied this. 
 
 International forensic experts on Monday inspect the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines jet that was shot down in eastern Ukraine last week. Associated Press 
 
 The U.S., which has largely backed Kiev's version of events, has said its intelligence analysts have evaluated a number of the audio recordings and said they were authentic. 
 
 Earlier on Monday, Gen. Makushev said that the two Russian radar stations near Russia's border with Ukraine observed the presence of the second aircraft over a period of four minutes on the day of Flight 17's crash. These stations couldn't identify the aircraft because it mostly likely wasn't equipped with the system of secondary identification of aircrafts, "which is characteristic of fighter jets," he said. 
 
 Gen. Makushev said that Russian radars could only spot the aircraft at the point of its ascension because the on-duty radars only detected objects at above 5,000 meters. Russian radars spotted the unidentified plane patrolling in the vicinity of Flight 17, "controlling the development of the situation," he said. 
 
 The defense ministry also said it registered the Su-25 fighter jet ascending within close range of several civil aircrafts, including the Malaysia Airlines jet. 
 
 Another top military official, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartapolov, said at the same news conference that the jet came as close as 1.8 miles to Flight 17, which is well within the range of the air-to-air missiles it is usually equipped with. 
 
 Interactives 
 
 Gen. Makushev also showed satellite photos allegedly showing several Buk-M1 ground-to-air missile systems in the area close to where the plane crashed. The systems, he argued, could only belong to the Ukrainian military. The Buks were spotted in Luhansk and Donetsk by Russians, Gen. Kartapolov said, in the days leading up to the crash. 
 
 Ukrainian officials have said its own Buk systems were well out of range, and have accused Russia of giving the rebels a Buk system, which then shot down the airliner. Russia denies this. 
 
 Public tracking website Flightradar24 followed Flight 17 from its departure from Amsterdam through to its final moments over Ukraine. The aircraft was observed to be roughly 10 miles north of the L980 jetway that was a part of its filed flight plan. Such a deviation isn't unusual, though, and can be affected by weather. 
 
 Similarly, Gen. Makushev said the Malaysia Airlines plane deviated from its course by close to 9 miles near Donetsk but then attempted to return to its course, crashing shortly after. Russian radars spotted the Flight 17 rapidly descending 32 miles away from the Russian border, Russian officials said. 
 
 He said Russia is prepared to hand all of the information it has to the European authorities, which included satellite imagery and data from its own radar. 
 
 Russian defense ministry officials also claimed that a U.S. satellite was spotted at the time of the Flight 17 crash and asked that the U.S. release the satellite images from that time. The U.S. didn't immediately comment on the claim. 
 
 —Joe Lauria 
 
 and Julian E. Barnes 
 
 and Jon Ostrower contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Olga Razumovskaya at olga.razumovskaya@wsj.com
– Malaysian officials "spent way too much time" looking for Flight 370 in the wrong places, charged House Homeland Security chair Michael McCaul this morning on Fox News Sunday. "We wasted a week of precious time at the mountain region when all along it’s been in the southern Indian Ocean, is where the location is," he said, amid news that French satellite images might show debris from the crash. "The good news is we’ve confined it to the area where the debris is so we can get to the black box to finally find out what may have happened in this case." Politico notes that he refused to rule out terrorism. Elsewhere on your Sunday dial: Mike Rogers on Vladimir Putin: "He goes to bed at night thinking of Peter the Great and he wakes up thinking of Stalin. We need to understand who he is and what he wants. It may not fit with what we believe of the 21st century." He wants military aid for areas Putin could target, "and you do that in conjunction with sanctions, now you've got something that says, ‘Mr. Putin, we're done with you expanding into other countries." Jimmy Carter on Big Brother: "I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored. And when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write the letter myself, put it in the Post Office and mail it, because I believe if I send an email, it will be monitored." Michael Chertoff on the Malaysian jet: "Increasingly, we face the question of what we call ‘inside threats. It could be pilots. It could be members of the crew. So I think the issue of screening and understanding when people are going off the rails inside the enterprise is going to become more of an issue. Mitt Romney on a 2016 run: Not going to happen. "I’m thinking about the people who I want to see running for president. I fully anticipate that I’ll be supporting one of them very vigorously." Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Deshchytsia: "The Ukrainian government is trying to use all the peaceful means, diplomatic means to stop the Russians." But, "people are also ready to defend their homeland."