Virtually any description of life under the monarchy makes anyone who knows Ceausescu's Bucharest wince with regret for the good old days. Architectu… - John Sweeney

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.

Ceausescu substituted constructive action with frenzy. He went on a continuous rollercoaster, whistle-stop tour of the country. Once on this whirligig of official visits, speeches and congresses, he never got off it. The whirligig became faster and faster and more elaborate, with visits to foreign countries and a constant shuffling of ministers and ministries. It makes anyone who tries to follow it dizzy. It consumed his and everybody else's time; it wasted resources and achieved little. But inside Ceausescu's head frenzy equalled progress: it was an intellectual confusion to which, as time rolled on, the whole country was to succumb.

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.