Perhaps Red Horizons is a scissors-and-paste job by an unsung, CIA-approved ghostwriter. The raw material reads like translated of Pacepa's debriefin… - John Sweeney

Putin is a rational actor inside a bunker, so deep, so deprived of light and information, that he is pulling levers without understanding how the modern world is responding, without understanding that some of his levers at least are no longer working, without understanding that invading countries at peace is what the Nazis did.

BBC Panorama sent me to the crash site [of MH17]. The Kremlin was furiously denying any involvement and its fog machine was working full-time. They were lying. I will never quite lose the memory of the smell of aeroplane fuel, human flesh and cornfield.

I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.