To judge by much of the western media coverage in recent days, you would have thought that Vladimir Putin had spent last Thursday sitting in the Kremlin, plotting how to blacken his image in the West even further, before settling on the brilliant idea of getting some clueless proxies to blow an international airliner out of the sky.
At least, if he had, the line of responsibility would be clear; the western arguments casting him and his country as global pariahs would incontestable, and we could all be contemplating moves not just to isolate Russia, but to haul Vladimir before the International Criminal Court.
For all the certainty that has attended western vilification of Putin – and UK news-stands on Saturday and Sunday showed barely one front-page that did not put him personally in the dock – two crucial facts remain unproven.
Even if anti-Kiev rebels in eastern Ukraine shot down flight MH17 because they mistook it for a Ukrainian transport plane, which appears the most likely explanation, it has not been established that the ground-to-air missile system used was supplied to them by Russia (as opposed to being looted from Ukrainian army stocks).
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