We could perhaps find a certain degree of reconciliation in this awful tragedy, if it was accidental, in the sense that a civilian transport was not the intended target. But what if it was not and the aircraft was deliberately targeted in an attempt to further isolate the Ukraine from the West. Then it can only be described as barbaric, the very worse of war crimes, acts which ocurred during the Balkan Wars. Violations of every rule in the book about how to conduct warfare. It had happened before and was happing again, somewhere else. In the West, the fact that the so called unrest in Eastern Ukraine had escalated to a major internal conflict,conducted not in strict observance of the Queensberry Rules must have been known and if not, should have been known to those who were tasked with the burden of responsibility for the safe conduct of passangers in all designated airspace. We are of course only too well acquainted with the precept that all air accidents involve a causal chain of factors, which when combined result in disaster. In this instance the major factor in this chain is the failure of proper and timely action to ban all civilian overflights in the region. Earlier in this thread someone had said it was the penny pinching bean counters to blame. I don`t think so. I would be inclined to question the faceless armies of bureaucrats, their painfully slow digestion and their highly developed skills of passing the buck.