As the Kremlin and conspiracy theorists are swift to point out, we do not yet know with absolute certainty who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, killing 298 people including at least 9 Britons.
Here’s a brief distillation of what we do know (more detail is available in this excellent summary by the FT):
So, as I began by saying, we do not yet have absolute certainty about who fired the fatal missile. What we do have is a mounting quantity of evidence which points only in one direction: that the Kremlin-backed separatists may well have shot down the airliner, believing it to be a Ukrainian military flight.
If that is indeed what happened, we have a truly monstrous scenario facing us. Yet again, Vladimir Putin’s strategy of destabilising and then dominating Russia’s neighbours will have generated a horrendous price in human suffering (I wrote on its effects in the South Caucusus a few months ago). Yet again, the isolationist myth that “this conflict has nothing to do with us” will have turned out to be tragically naive.
Not only have British lives been lost, but an attack has been made on hundreds of innocent civilians, and peace in Europe is under more severe threat than for many years. As Garvan Walshe argued when Russia annexed the Crimea, allowing such deeds to go unpunished only breeds more atrocities, more aggression and more suffering.
The question, though, is what we can feasibly do? Here are the four options I can see:
1) Sanctions should be drastically extended, and applied much more broadly than simply to a list of individuals in the Russian government and military. (Not to the White House: please don’t give them advance notice to move all their cash this time, thanks).
2) NATO should redeploy in sizeable force to Eastern Europe, effectively moving the old German bases east rather than abandoning them entirely as was recently planned. It should also fast-track the membership of threatened nations such as Georgia into the alliance.
3) Carry out a swift and full Strategic Defence Review with the possibility of Russian aggression against its European neighbours in mind. I argued last month that we Conservatives need to properly thrash out a balance between austerity and defence – this need is growing more urgent by the day.
4) Bring back to life the plans for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe, which were variously ditched and downgraded by the Obama administration. The decision not to go ahead with a purely defensive measure, a shield protecting much of Europe from attack, was interpreted in many places a sign that the Americans were appeasing the Kremlin – it appears Putin may have interpreted it that way, too.
It isn’t necessarily a question of doing one or another – all four combined would be a wise approach.