A Russian television channel said Wednesday it had lost contact with a British journalist reporting from conflict-torn eastern Ukraine.

RT said on its website it had been unable to reach Graham Phillips since the early hours of Wednesday after he went to cover intense fighting around Donetsk airport.

The first bodies from flight MH17 arrived in the Netherlands on Wednesday almost a week after it was shot down over Ukraine, with grieving relatives and the king and queen solemnly receiving the as yet unidentified victims.

Church bells rang out throughout the country as the planes touched down with the much-delayed return of the first 40 bodies of the 298 people killed in the disaster, most of them Dutch.

The Netherlands and other countries that lost citizens in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 are proposing sending police officers to secure the crash site in rebel-held east Ukraine, authorities in Kiev have said.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the offer was made by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte "to provide security at the crash scene and surrounding area in order to ensure an independent international investigation into the reasons for the catastrophe."

Russia announced Wednesday that it had begun expanding and modernizing its Black Sea fleet based in Crimea with new ships and submarines, just months after annexing the peninsula from Ukraine.

"Today we have started forming a powerful Black Sea fleet with an absolutely different level of air service, coastal missile and artillery troops and marines," said Alexander Vitko, the Black Sea fleet commander, in a message to servicemen.

Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Wednesday it was possible that many bodies from the MH17 crash were still lying in the open in Ukraine, as remains were recovered from a morgue train.

All 298 people onboard the Malaysia Airlines jet, including 28 Australian nationals and nine residents, were killed after the aircraft was apparently shot down over eastern Ukraine last week.

U.S. Airways plans to resume its direct flights from Philadelphia to Tel Aviv on Thursday after a temporary ban from federal authorities on flights to Israel amid an intensifying conflict with the Palestinians.

Malaysia's bitterly divided political forces put aside their differences on Wednesday to denounce the attack on flight MH17 as a heinous international crime and call jointly for swift justice for those responsible.

Prime Minister Najib Razak led the charge, condemning the Malaysia Airlines flight's shooting down by a surface-to-air missile.

Russia is struggling with a flood of refugees who already number half a million from the fighting in eastern Ukraine, and many appear increasingly likely to stay, officials and activists said. 

Malaysian flight MH17 may have been shot down by "mistake" by ill-trained pro-Russian separatists, U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday, while dismissing Moscow's accounts of the incident as propaganda.

International monitors on Tuesday said body parts still lay scattered at eastern Ukraine's unsecured crash site of downed flight MH17, as Dutch experts said they were given 80 fewer corpses than promised by the rebels.

"There were human remains that had not been picked up," said Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observer mission after visiting the scene, amid reports of the wreckage being rearranged.