The G20 Summit in Australia ends. The assembled leaders start the long flights home.

The results are in the communique, a classic example of a dull, badly written, important text:

We have agreed on a set of voluntary leading practices to promote and prioritise quality investment, particularly in infrastructure. To help match investors with projects, we will address data gaps and improve information on project pipelines. We are working to facilitate long-term financing from institutional investors and to encourage market sources of finance, including transparent securitisation, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises…

Trade and competition are powerful drivers of growth, increased living standards and job creation. In today’s world we don’t just trade final products. We work together to make things by importing and exporting components and services…

We have agreed to measures to dampen risk channels between banks and non-banks. But critical work remains to build a stronger, more resilient financial system. The task now is to finalise remaining elements of our policy framework and fully implement agreed financial regulatory reforms, while remaining alert to new risks.

So many shifty comparatives. And all those clunky tautologies, to make it even less readable: fully implement; strongly committed. And the sentences where something has been stuck in as if randomly, to help manage the soundbite bee buzzing in someone’s policy bonnet:

We welcome the breakthrough between the United States and India that will help the full and prompt implementation of the Trade Facilitation Agreement and includes provisions on food security

We reaffirm our commitment to rationalise and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption, recognising the need to support the poor

And so on.

The main political interest was how President Putin would fare with other leaders. His very presence was of course a victory of sorts for him. It showed that far from being ‘isolated’, he continues to be treated as respectable company despite launching an invasion of Ukraine in brazen disregard of the most basic international principles. Plus President Obama has his problems too:

This week at the Beijing summit there was no sign the leaders of the world had any particular regard for him. They can read election returns. They respect power and see it leaking out of him. If Mr. Obama had won the election they would have faked respect and affection.

Vladimir Putin delivered the unkindest cut, patting Mr. Obama’s shoulder reassuringly. Normally that’s Mr. Obama’s move, putting his hand on your back or shoulder as if to bestow gracious encouragement, needy little shrimp that you are. It’s a dominance move. He’s been doing it six years. This time it was Mr. Putin doing it to him. The president didn’t like it.

Such gatherings require deft handling by leaders personally. Every smile or frown or hand gesture is watched by the world as by the other leaders present, to see who is getting on with whom at the moment and who is getting the subtly turned back.

Within the G20 Putin has some allies, of sorts. Argentina, Brazil, China, India and (shame on them) South Africa all abstained in the key UN General Assembly resolution in March denouncing Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea. Not so much because they want to see re-established in international law the proposition that if you don’t like your neighbour’s policies, you grab some of his land. Rather because each in their own cynical way they are happy for now for Russia to strut an ‘anti-Western’ posture, and if Ukraine is collateral damage, too bad.

This time in Brisbane Putin had some sharp exchanges with different G20 leaders, with David Cameron to the fore in warning publicly of further sanctions if Russia does not change course on Ukraine. Putin in turn has not been shy in pointing out that Western sanctions hurt Ukraine itself:

Do they want to bankrupt our banks? In that case they will bankrupt Ukraine. Have they thought about what they are doing at all or not? Or has politics blinded them? As we know eyes constitute a peripheral part of brain. Was something switched off in their brains?”

Putin has a point. The EU/USA turn the screws on Russia. Russia turns the screws on Ukraine. And if Russia’s financial system itself really starts to wobble under the growing pressures to find money to pay back its international debts as energy prices fall, what could be the repercussions for EU banks in turn?

All of which said, part of the point of these meetings is for leaders to get a renewed sense of each other’s basic intentions and limits. Maybe there is a subtle sub-plot in this G20 summit that it is dawning on all concerned that the situation in Ukraine is simply bad for everyone, so maybe some more peaceful moves might now be tried?

That idea is consistent with the news today that Ukraine is going to start denying rebel-held areas with basic services. That helps these so-called rebels and their supporters accept certain ‘consequences’ for their violence. But it also gives them what they want most, namely reasons to ask Russia to intervene to help them, thereby making their de facto separation from Ukraine a notch more difficult to reverse. Is it better for Kiev to accept that reality (for now) but at least not subsidise it?

Or maybe not. Perhaps Russia and Ukraine will start much heavier fighting, and the problem will escalate with unpredictable but possibly awful ramifications for all of us.

Whatever the reality, the negotiation aspects of this problem are fraught with interest. Even if there is an agreed but unspoken ‘sense’ among key leaders that the time has come to reverse the Ukraine problem out of its current deep hole, how in fact to achieve that?

Russia can insist that some sanctions be eased as a confidence-building measure before it does anything significant, just as EU/USA in turn can call for Russia to demonstrate some good faith moves first.

Diplomacy. Just like the rules in a children’s playground. “This time you go first!” “No! You go first!”

So simple, yet so difficult.