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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country will not take control of the black boxes.

“Despite what Kiev is again saying, we do not plan to take these [black] boxes. We do not plan to violate existing [international] norms for such situations,” Lavrov said on Russian state television.

Failure to make available the black box flight recorders from the downed plane would cause Russia “major embarrassment,” a UK computer systems engineering professor told the Daily Telegraph.

Not handing over black boxes to the appropriate investigating authority is “not playing by the rules”, said Professor David Allerton of the University of Sheffield.

He went on: “The only reason you would do something like this is if you had something to hide.”

The governor of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region says both black boxes have been recovered.

“Two black boxes were found by our emergency services. I have no information on where these boxes are at the moment,” Kostyantyn Batovsky told the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

Earlier Friday, an aide to the military leader of Borodai’s group said authorities had recovered eight out of 12 recording devices.

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Since planes usually have two black boxes — one for recording flight data and the other for recording cockpit voices — it was not clear what the number 12 referred to.

An angry Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott demanded an independent inquiry into the downing.

“The initial response of the Russian ambassador was to blame Ukraine for this and I have to say that is deeply, deeply unsatisfactory,” he said. “It’s very important that we don’t allow Russia to prevent an absolutely comprehensive investigation so that we can find out exactly what happened here.”