At a White House press conference on Friday, President Barack Obama delivered a statement on the airliner disaster in Ukraine.

"This was a global tragedy," Obama said. "An Asian airliner was destroyed in European skies filled with citizens from many countries, so there has to be a credible international investigation into what happened."

On Thursday, a Malaysian Airliner, Flight MH17, took off from Amsterdam was shot down over Eastern Ukraine killing all 298 people on board.

Obama warned against getting ahead of the facts but said, "The plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile that was launched from an area that is controlled by Russian-back separatists inside of Ukraine."

Obama said this wasn't the first plane to be shot down in the region as over the past several weeks three other planes have been shot down with Russian separatists claiming responsibility.

At question time, a reporter asked if the U.S. believe the passenger jet was targeted or that those people who shot it down may have been going after a military aircraft?

"Well, I think it's too early for us to be able to guess what the intentions of those who might have launched this surface-to-air missile might have had. This investigation's going to be ongoing. ... At this point, in terms of identifying or, you know, personnel ordered the strike, how it came about, those are things that I think are still going to be subject to additional information that we're going to be gathering."

And later, "[O]bviously, we're beginning to draw some conclusions given the nature of the shot that was fired. There are only certain types of antiaircraft missiles that can reach up to 30,000 feet and shoot down a passenger jet."

Obama did, however, complain about Russia doing too little to control the separatists and supporting them with training and equipment. "Time and again, Russia has refused to de-escalate the situation.

"If Mr. Putin makes a decision that we are not going to allow heavy armaments and the flow of fighters into Ukraine across the Ukraine-Russian border, then it will stop," Obama said.

Obama called for an immediate cease-fire to allow for an investigation into what happened.

"Nearly 300 innocent lives were taken -- men, women, children, infants who had nothing to do with the crisis in Ukraine," Obama said. "Their deaths are an outraged of unspeakable proportions."

He said on checking the flight manifest they knew one American citizen has died, Quinn Lucas Schansman, but said, "I don't want to say with absolute certainty that there might not be additional Americans."

To date those who died were 189 people were from the Netherlands, 29 passengers and 15 crew were from Malaysia and 27 passengers were from Australia.

"Officials from the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board were on their way to Ukraine to help determine what happened," Obama said. He warned that evidence not be tampered with as a United Nations-back investigation goes forward.

The Associated Press reported, "The National Transportation Safety Board was sending a single investigator to the Ukraine as part of a delegation to assist with the investigations."