Ukraine admitted for the first time yesterday that one of its missiles may have accidentally struck a Russian passenger jet over the Black Sea last week.
All 78 crew and passengers, mostly Russian-born Israelis, died after the Tu-154 jet exploded at high altitude and crashed into the sea on October 4th.
Ukraine, whose military had at first firmly denied responsibility, said yesterday a missile from live rocket-firing exercises on the Crimean Black Sea peninsula could have caused the disaster.
"The cause may have been an accidental hit from an S200 rocket fired during Ukrainian exercises," Mr Evhen Marchuk, head of Ukraine's National Security Council, said at a news conference held to present crash investigators' preliminary findings.
"It is difficult for me, a Ukrainian citizen, to say this, but there is a lot of information in favour of this version," he said, in the southern Russian port of Sochi, where the investigation is based.
Mr Vladimir Rushailo, head of Russia's Security Council, told the news conference investigators had concluded that the crash resulted from a strike by an anti-aircraft missile warhead.
Initial fears the aircraft had been the target of terrorism following the September 11th attacks on the United States quickly gave way to suspicions that Ukrainian exercises some 200 km from the crash site were to blame.
Shortly after the disaster, US officials said a spy satellite showed a missile plume in the vicinity of the crash. Ukraine's military and its Defence Minister, Mr Oleksander Kuzmuk, denied repeatedly in the days after the crash that their forces were at fault.
On Thursday, Ukrainian officials revealed that Mr Kuzmuk had offered to quit immediately after reports appeared implicating Ukraine but that President Leonid Kuchma had refused, preferring to wait for the investigators' report.
President Kuchma sought to play down the disaster this week, saying "bigger mistakes have been made". He drew bitter condemnation from Israel.
This is the second time in 18 months that Ukraine's armed forces have lost control of a live missile.