Despot Vladimir Putin responsible for so much evil

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: AFP

The 38 Australians murdered on MH17 were among the first victims of Vladimir Putin’s war of extermination against Ukraine, which started eight years ago and resumed in February this year.

As the Dutch court has now found, it was a Russian missile that downed the civilian airliner, fired from a battery that had crossed the border into Ukraine and that subsequently returned to Russia. Russian missile batteries don’t cross borders by accident. Ultimate responsibility for this atrocity rests with the Russian dictator who authorised his forces to enter Ukraine and who fomented the stooge uprising in the Donbas.

Even in the early hours of July 18, 2014, our time, it was obvious what had happened from intercepted radio traffic broadcast over the media. The Russian operatives thought they had brought down a Ukrainian troop transport and their exultation turned to dismay when they realised that they had killed 298 innocent people.

As I subsequently told the Russian despot, in a “shirt-front” conversation on the sidelines of the Beijing APEC meeting that year, his troops may not have intended to kill the citizens of many countries but the reckless indifference to human life with which the missile was fired made it a dreadful crime. But as Russia’s indiscriminate terror bombardment of Ukrainian cities shows, Putin has always treated moral distinctions with complete contempt. This is someone who has invaded his neighbours and murdered his opponents whenever and wherever he thought he could get away with it, and the horror is that he’s been allowed to get away with it for so long.

His response to my insistence back then that Russia take responsibility, apologise, and pay reparations to the families of the dead was to blame Ukrainian “provocateurs”, to claim that the Ukrainian government was controlled by “fascists”, and to insist that Ukraine was part of Russia and had no right to exist as an independent country. Even then it was clear, in his perverted way, that he saw himself as anointed by God to recreate the Russia of Peter the Great.

In the days after the downing, as the Russian-backed rebels pillaged and looted the wreckage in full view of the world’s cameras, it’s no secret that I told our defence chiefs to start planning for a joint military operation with the Dutch to secure the site, gather evidence, and bring home our dead in the face of Russian intransigence. Fortunately, an armed intervention into a distant war zone turned out not to be necessary but I’m sure the prospect of it helped to persuade the Russians and their proxies to allow Australian police and crash investigators, plus their international colleagues, to do what had to be done.

To this day, I am proud of the way our police and military, including the special forces who remained on standby, and other agencies worked to give a decent homecoming to Putin’s early victims. Foreign minister Julie Bishop was at her best at the UN Security Council.

I don’t think enough was done to help Ukraine resist Putin’s first invasion but the establishment of an Australian embassy in Kyiv was a lasting sign of our solidarity with a brave people under existential threat, and the sooner it reopens the better.

Nothing can bring back those who should never have been killed nor lift the pain of their grieving families. Still, this confirmation that there was no mystery to their deaths might be some comfort. Not since Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot has a national leader been responsible for such evil. We must help the Ukrainians to keep winning because that’s the best way to have justice done.

Tony Abbott was prime minister of Australia, 2013-15