If the pro-Russian militants are confident that it was the government of Ukraine that shot down MH17, it would make sense that they would allow a full investigation and keep the crash site undisturbed so that link could be made. But as many have found out, they have been doing the exact opposite.

Besides deleting many of the social-media postings already referenced, militants blocked observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from going to the crash site, at one point even firing a warning shot, Spencer Ackerman reports in The Guardian.

“The assumption is they’re trying to remove evidence of what they did,” a senior U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence told The Wall Street Journal on Saturday.