Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Monday that he will "shirtfront" Russian President Vladimir Putin over the issue of the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in July.
The leaders are expected to meet at the G20 summit to be held in Brisbane next month.
"I'm going to shirtfront Mr. Putin," Abbott told reporters, using the Australian Rules Football term for a head-on charge aimed at knocking an opponent to the ground.
"There'll be a lot of tough conversations with Russia, and I suspect the conversation that I have with Mr. Putin will be the toughest conversation of all," he said, reports the Associated Press.
Abbott said that he would seek a bilateral meeting with Putin where he will tell him that Australia was very unhappy about the fact that its citizens were murdered by Russian backed rebels using the weapons supplied by Russia.
Elaborating further, Abbott said that he will also demand full cooperation from Putin regarding criminal investigation into the incident, though Australia accepts that Russia did not want the incident to happen.
Meanwhile, Opposition leader Bill Shorten said that Putin should "show enough conscience" not to come to the G20 summit. Though Shorten accepted that Australia had no control over the invitation list to the summit, he took a swipe at the government for laying out a red carpet for Putin.
"It's an international conference, not a conference run by Australia, so if Putin has the arrogance to turn up to visit a nation whose nationals died in this plane crash, he can," Shorten said, reports The Guardian.
The MH17 plane, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in Ukraine in pro-Russian rebel-held territory on July 17. All of the 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board died in the crash.
Bilateral relations between Russia and Australia are at a low over Russia's involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Both of the countries have also imposed trade sanctions on each other.
