AKIPRESS.COM - Workers from the Emergency Situations Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic began loading wreckage on to lorries yesterday, reports Independent.

The work, supervised by Dutch investigators and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, follows months of wrangling over access, meaning that debris and passengers' belongings have been left strewn across the eight-square-mile (20 sq km) crash site for months.

The wreckage, which will be cut into smaller parts for transportation, will be loaded on to trains bound for the government-controlled city of Kharkiv before being flown to the Netherlands for analysis.

Rebel emergency services officials said the recovery could take 10 days.

Removal of the wreckage has also been delayed by fighting between rebels and Ukrainian government forces.

Flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was blown out of the sky over separatist-held territory in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all 298 passengers and crew.

A preliminary report released by the Dutch Safety Board in September concluded that the aircraft had been destroyed by multiple "high-energy objects", but stopped short of assigning blame for the crash.

Ukraine and Western governments have said that the aircraft was mistakenly shot down by rebels using a sophisticated anti-aircraft missile system supplied by Russia.

Russia and separatists from the Donetsk People's Republic, who controlled the area where the plane crashed, have denied the charge, instead arguing that Ukrainian forces shot down the plane using their own anti-aircraft systems or possibly a jet fighter.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, came under renewed pressure over the crash at the G20 summit in Brisbane after Tony Abbot, the Australian prime minister, threatened to "shirt-front" him over the crash, in which 27 Australians died. "Shirt-front" is an Australian Rules football term meaning to charge someone head-on.

Mr Putin left the summit early yesterday after frosty encounters with David Cameron, Barack Obama, and Steven Harper, the Canadian PM.

Over the weekend, Russian state television released a satellite photograph it claims shows that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down MH17.

But several bloggers said the photograph was a forgery, citing a cloud pattern to prove the photo dates back to 2012, and several other details that seem incongruous.