SYDNEY — Australia is close to finalizing a deal with Ukraine to send police and a small number of troops to secure the Malaysian plane crash site as part of a multinational team, the Australian prime minister said today.

Australia has 90 federal police officers in Europe ready to be deployed to the site in eastern Ukraine where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed last week, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. Some of the officers could be armed, and would be accompanied by members of Australia’s defense force, he said.

Armed pro-Russian separatists control the area and have hampered investigators’ attempts to access the site.

Abbott stressed that the team, which would include countries that lost citizens in the disaster, would not be going in as part of a military mission.

“This is a humanitarian mission ... with a clear and simple objective: to bring them home,” Abbott told reporters in Canberra, the nation’s capital.