With Jet Strike, War in Ukraine Is Felt Globally (Published 2014)

WASHINGTON — From the start, the telephone call did not go well. Dispensing with pleasantries, President Vladimir V. Putin launched into an edgy and long-winded complaint about the new American sanctions imposed on Russia the day before.

President Obama, on the phone from the Oval Office on Thursday morning, responded that Russia was arming rebels in Ukraine — citing among other things the antiaircraft weapons that the United States believed they had been sent. “This is not something we’re making up,” Mr. Obama said, according to an American official.

Then, more than halfway through the tense, hourlong call, Mr. Putin noted, almost in passing, that he had received a report of an aircraft going down in Ukraine.

Mr. Putin was vague about the details, and the conversation moved on. But in that instant, the monthslong proxy war between East and West took a devastating turn, one that would shift the ground geopolitically amid the charred wreckage and broken bodies in a Ukrainian wheat field.

The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 rippled across multiple continents — from Amsterdam, where friends and family had just seen off their loved ones, to the distant shores of Asia and Australia that had been waiting for 298 passengers and crew who would never show up. The tragedy reached as far as a college campus in Bloomington, Ind., shocked to find one of its doctoral students among the dead.

It was a day of confusion and anger, of grief and disbelief, of charges and countercharges, of politics and war. It was a day that brought home in vivid relief the consequences of a struggle in a torn society that had seemed far removed for many. And it was a day that was a long time in the making.