His said his priority was to do ''the right thing'' by the Australian victims and their families by ensuring bodies were treated with respect, the crash site was secured and a thorough investigation undertaken. Prime Minster Tony Abbott and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop at a media conference on the downing of MH17. Credit:Brett Hemmings/Getty Images ''Then of course, we have to punish the guilty,'' he said. ''We have to do our best to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice.'' Mr Abbott said while there had been some signs of improvement, including Ukrainian government officials gaining some access to the site, the situation was still completely unacceptable. ''The site is being treated more like a garden clean-up than a forensic investigation,'' he said. ''The wreckage has been picked over, it's been trashed, it's been trampled.''

Australian experts are in Kiev, ready to travel to the crash site controlled by pro-Russian militiamen, who have loaded almost 200 bodies into refrigerated train wagons. Mr Abbott said an Australian military aircraft was on standby to ''play our part to ensure that we get justice for the dead and closure for the living''. On Sunday, Mr Abbott convened both a cabinet and a national security committee meeting. He also met Labor leader Bill Shorten, before Mr Shorten left for a trip to the United States. While Mr Abbott did not go into detail of what he and Mr Putin discussed, during an interview with Channel Nine on Sunday the Prime Minister said he would be putting Australia's profound concern about what was happening to the 298 bodies at the crash site and ask for Russia's help to ensure they are treated with dignity.

''If he wants to be a friend of Australia, if he wants to be a friend of decency and humanity, all assistance that he might be able to offer would be deeply appreciated at this time,'' he said. The Kremlin's website also confirmed the conversation between Mr Putin and Mr Abbott, a translation saying that the Russian president ''expressed his sincere condolences on the death of Australian citizens in the crash of an airliner''. The website statement added that Russia had taken steps to promote an international investigation into the circumstances of the crash and ''both sides stressed the importance to the completion of the investigation to avoid politicised statements in connection with the tragedy''. It concluded by saying that Mr Putin and Mr Abbott had ''agreed to continue contact''. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, meanwhile, said overnight on Sunday that the Australian government would not rest until the bodies of 37 citizens and residents ''murdered'' over the Ukraine are repatriated and the perpetrators of the missile strike that killed them brought to justice.

Ms Bishop arrived in Washington DC on Sunday morning and received detailed briefings from CIA chief John Brennan and the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, at the residence of Australian Ambassador Kim Beazley. She said those meetings confirmed that ''the possibilities as to what caused this crash have narrowed''. ''What we do know is that MH17 was brought down by a missile in eastern Ukraine in territory held by the Russian-backed rebels,'' Ms Bishop said. ''The details should be the subject of an international investigation.'' She said separatists had restricted access to the site, moved bodies and tampered with evidence.

Ms Bishop was scheduled to travel to New York later to meet with foreign counterparts including the Dutch foreign minister and British foreign secretary, before leading the Australian UN delegation’s team in pushing for a tough resolution calling for immediate access to the crash site and an independent international investigation into the missile strike that brought down flight MH17. She said she hoped a resolution would be passed as soon as possible. A United Nations Security Council meeting is expected to be held on Monday in New York. ''I say to the separatists and the Russian government that backs them, that there are 298 bodies on that site. Their families, their loved ones want them home now,'' she said. ''This is not a time to use bodies as hostages or pawns in a Ukrainian-Russian conflict.'' She said the UN was an appropriate forum to express global outrage at an attack that had affected so many nations.

''Australia has a great deal at stake here - 37 Australians – 28 citizens and a number of permanent residents of Australia – were on that flight,'' Ms Bishop. ''They have been murdered and the Australian government will not rest until we are able to bring the bodies home to the Australian families who are waiting for them, and will not rest until an independent investigation is established that is impartial and thorough and competent and able to determine who is responsible for this and they are brought to justice.'' During a stopover in Tokyo Ms Bishop used her time to call some of the families of Australians who had been on the flight. ''I can't overstate how determined the Australian government is to support the families.'' Ms Bishop also told Sky News on Monday morning that she expected Russia to support the UN resolution.

She said Australia was seeking the ''strongest possible resolution of the United Nations Security Council to secure the site of the air crash so that the bodies ... killed on this flight can be identified, retrieved and repatriated back to Australia''. It ''condemns in the strongest terms the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17'' and ''demands that all states and other actors in the region refrain from acts of violence directed against civilian aircraft''. ''It's an outrage that the site has been contaminated, bodies have been removed and have not been handed over to independent authorities,'' she told Sky News. Rhetoric against Mr Putin has escalated after reports at the weekend that US intelligence believes Russia supplied sophisticated surface-to-air missiles to Ukrainian separatists and attempted to remove them after the strike. America’s chief diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry, appeared on five major political talk shows on Sunday morning to lay out the case against Russia.

''Russia has armed the separatists,'' Mr Kerry told ABC's This Week. ''Russia has supported the separatists. Russia has trained the separatists. Russia continues to refuse to call publicly for the separatists to engage in behaviour that would lend itself to a resolution of this issue. ''And the fact is that only a few weeks ago, a convoy of 150 vehicles of artillery, armoured personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, tanks, crossed over from Russia into this area and these items were all turned over to the separatists.'' Speaking on CNN he said he had reports of ''drunken separatists piling the remains in an unceremonious fashion and actually removing them from the location''. The Democratic chairwoman of the powerful Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, said on Sunday morning that she believed the US-Russian relationship was now at Cold War levels. ''This has become a huge human drama, and I think the nexus between Russia and the separatists has been established very clearly, so the issue is where is Putin?'' she said on CNN's State of the Union program.

''I would say, 'Putin, you have to man up. You should talk to the world. You should say, if this is a mistake, which I hope it was, say it.' ''The world has to rise up and say, 'We've had enough of this,' '' Feinstein said. ''I think we have to continue with sanctions, and that's difficult.'' Views in London have also hardened against Mr Putin, with the British Prime Minister David Cameron writing in an unusual front-page editorial for the Daily Telegraph, ''If President Putin does not change his approach to Ukraine, then Europe and the West must fundamentally change our approach to Russia. ''This is not about military action, plainly. But it is time to make our power, influence and resources count,'' he wrote. Loading

with Judith Ireland, Esther Han and AAP Follow us on Twitter