Bert Koenders made his assessment Saturday in Kharkiv, attending a memorial for five sets of human remains collected from the site of the disaster, where a plane went down en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. Officials have flown the remains to the Netherlands for a national ceremony on Monday.

"We cannot say at this moment in any certain way ... at what moment, and even if, we can recover the last nine," the Dutch foreign minister said on Saturday.

The July 17 crash of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 killed all 298 people onboard, 193 of whom had Dutch citizenship. Ukraine and its allies in the United States and Europe have blamed separatist fighters for the catastrophe, claiming they accidentally shot down the plane with a surface-to-air missile; Russia, which has backed the rebels, has pointed the finger at forces loyal to the government in Kyiv.

Eight soldiers for the Ukrainian government died in fighting late Friday and into Saturday, adding to the more than 4,000 people killed since April. Ukraine's military announced that the weekend's deaths included a paratrooper shot by a sniper at the Donetsk international airport, where government forces have defended a pocket of territory near the biggest separatist-held city. The military reported that the shelling of government positions around the conflict zone had wounded 17 other soldiers.

'On the brink'

Relations between Russia and Ukraine's US and EU backers have cooled to their frostiest level in decades. Russia's economy has suffered under sanctions imposed since the crisis, and more could come after Moscow welcomed recent elections in separatist-held towns, billed as boosting rebels' claim to independence.

"The world is on the brink of a new Cold War," Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, said at an event Saturday in Germany to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Some are even saying that it has already begun."

In Beijing for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to soften Russia's position, saying that US involvement in attempts to resolve the crisis could prove a "step in the right direction." However, in his own comments marking the Berlin Wall anniversary, US President Barack Obama said that "as Russia's actions against Ukraine remind us, we have more work to do to fully realize our shared vision of a Europe that is whole, free and at peace."

In a phone call Friday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Russia had sent tanks and other heavy machinery into the country.

mkg/sb (Reuters, AFP, dpa, AP)