My latest piece at Telegraph Blogs on the MH17 disaster and who knows what has picked up a lot of attention, including in Australia:

The cause of the attack on the plane will have been known immediately to the Russian side. Missiles capable of hitting aircraft at that altitude cannot be fired without complex codes and technical support. The Russians know everything about the attack, down to the serial number of the missile and the names and breakfast rations of the people who ordered the attack. The Russians also know exactly what links there are (if any) between the people who fired the missile and their own GRU command structures.

The Americans will know a lot of this, too. We may not like global IT surveillance, but it resolves situations like this. Washington is doubtless poring through myriad satellite images and thousands of conversations in Russian military slang to establish in minute detail what happened when the missile was fired and who ordered it. Likewise, the Ukrainians know plenty – they do not have the GRU’s resources, but they are highly motivated to follow what the “rebels” and “separatists” are doing…

… Moscow therefore faces the indignation and contempt of a wide range of countries for its handling of this crisis, above all for not using all its influence to push the rebels out of the way so that normal international procedures can take place.

This vile policy, on the part of permanent member of the UN Security Council, creates dilemmas for the rest of us – not least because Moscow’s behaviour and tone go way beyond anything normal or honourable, as understood under the international rules for such incidents that Russia itself helped to draft.

The Americans are in a difficult position. If they know that Russia’s GRU personnel were closely involved in the decision to attack the plane, this means that the highest political levels in Moscow carry direct command responsibility.

What to do with that information? If it is made public, calls for strong action against Putin and his team will swell in Washington and around the world. Yet what action might make a positive difference? More sanctions? Diplomatic isolation? Or would it be better to use this information only in tough private conversations with the Russians, in the hope of de-escalating the crisis and striking a strategic deal on Ukraine?

Good questions. As we have now seen, the US version of events has been studiously drafted to exclude any ‘direct’ link to Russia’s official involvement in this disaster. And as expected, the European Union is not sure about what to do about it all, even when many Europeans were blown out of sky in circumstances pointing firmly in Moscow’s direction.

On ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme this morning I made the point that European trade with Russia is big and complicated, and that the whole point about ‘sanctions’ is that they hurt both the sanctioned and the sanctioner. So it’s not surprising that it’s hard for European governments to agree measures that make some sense in themselves but also are likely to influence V Putin in the ‘right’ direction. And this (I said) is the basic difficulty: what does Putin actually want from this shambles, and if that is clear are we morally and politicaly able to strike a deal with him accordingly?

As if by magic, Iain Martin looks at precisely that question, and nails the key aspects of it:

… whatever is finally decided by the EU’s leaders (and I suspect not much will be), it should not blind us to the painful political realities. Unfortunately, once all the speechifying is over, the bottom line is that any longer-term resolution of the Ukrainian crisis is going to have to involve a deal of some kind with Russia. That is the way it is…

A country that endured 70 years of communism and totalitarianism, that took tens of millions of casualties in World War Two, is hardly going to crumble under the weight of restrictions on trade if they ever are pushed through by Obama and Cameron. Not when Russia sees Ukraine as being within its sphere of influence and fears its diplomatic drift westwards, for perfectly valid and understandable reasons. We can say that it should not be so, now the European Union and Jean Claude Juncker are in existence. We can say that now the EU has naively decided to bring Ukraine under its wing, the Russians should forget centuries of history and generally just chillax about this stuff. It is not going to happen, or not right now it is not.

I say this not to excuse any of the idiocy or the gangsterism perpetrated in Russia’s name. Far from it.

But the only realistic answer to crisis in Ukraine is an international deal of some form, in which both the EU and Russia back off Ukraine, as much as possible, and the integrity of the government of Ukraine is recognised and minority rights protected. Russia, Ukraine, the US and the EU all need to be at the table for what would be difficult negotiations. After the disasters of the last week, Putin may even welcome a deal.

Beautifully put.

And that, folks, is Diplomacy. All sides accepting and agreeing that if they stick to firm and heartfelt points of principle, they’ll drag on towards even bigger disaster. Why not sit down and work on steering the whole grim issue in a saner direction?

Putin’s speeches alas evince no sign that this is what he wants. In fact part of the drama here is the morally bleak, crassly defiant tone he has adopted following the destruction of MH17 – he and most Western leaders are just on a different psychological wavelength, to a point where establishing the private mutual confidence needed to do deals is all the harder.

If you don’t believe me, watch this. Imagine that Putin had asked for talking-points before his press conference a few years ago on Chechnya. Not one person on the planet could have drafted what he in fact said, leaving Solana and the other leaders at the table in utter silence (and disbelief).

Yesterday I watched again for the first time in decades Apocalypse Now. The movie’s intellectual climax is this devastating speech by Kurtz:

We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.

… And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.

And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.

You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment!

Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

This thought needs developing separately. But are the madmen of ISIS and Hamas and the people around Putin and even Putin himself driven by a ruthlessness that goes far beyond Western ‘judgement’?

And, if so, what?