- Prime Minister Abbott announces that former Air Chief Marshal (and now Lowy Institute board member) Angus Houston will go to Ukraine as his personal envoy.
- Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has gone to New York to lead diplomatic efforts for a binding UNSC resolution mandating an independent investigation.
- Here's The Guardian's latest report on the content of the draft UN resolution.
- John Garnaut on what China will do in the UN Security Council. Will Xi follow Putin or Abbott.
- James Fallows in the New York Times: don't blame Malaysian Airlines.
- Obama calls on Europe to do more; says 'We don’t see a U.S. military role beyond what we’ve already been doing'.
- Marc Ambinder on how Obama's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, used the KAL007 shootdown in 1983 to pressure the Soviet Union. Here's Reagan's address to the nation:
- ASPI's Peter Jennings says Ukraine, Syria and Iraq all demonstrate that great powers have paid too little attention to lawless regions.
- David Remnick in the New Yorker:
Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control. Putin’s defiant annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine inflated his popularity at home. Despite a flaccid economy, his approval rating approaches levels rarely seen beyond North Korea. But the tactically clever and deeply cynical maneuvers of propaganda and military improvisation that have taken him this far, one of his former advisers told me in Moscow earlier this month, are bound to risk unanticipated disasters. Western economic and political sanctions may be the least of it.