Pavlo Klimkin told the Guardian on Friday morning that the Ukrainian army has no such missiles in the area, and also insisted that none have been seized by separatist fighters in recent weeks. "We are absolutely sure and we checked yesterday that no missiles have been taken from the Ukrainian army," said Klimkin.
Separatist fighters in the region have shot down a number of Ukrainian planes and helicopters in recent days, and a video has surfaced from several days ago in which a well-known Kremlin cheerleader, Sergei Kurginyan, said after a visit to Donetsk in recent days that the rebels had seized a Ukrainian "Buk" missile system.
Kurginyan said in the video that specialists from Russia had travelled to the region to fix the missile system, "as a friendly gesture to a brotherly nation".
Additionally, a news item on Russian state television from late June announced that the rebels had taken control of a Ukrainian Buk system. However, Klimkin was adamant that this was not the case.
"Our military forces don't use any sort of anti-air missile in the region of anti-terror operation, so there could be no even theoretical possibility of taking this kind of missile," he told the Guardian.
...The Donetsk region contains a number of different militias whose actions are not always coordinated, and an aide to top commander Igor Strelkov told Associated Press on Thursday that his boss had not yet decided whether to allow investigators access to the site.