At the MH17 crash site: the tragic collision of two worlds

The landscape around the village Grabove is exactly as you would expect it at this time of year. Vast horizons, endless fields of sunflowers and wheat as far as the eye can see.

This is the grain basket of eastern Europe. It is the kind of place that you might glance at from 33,000ft without giving it a second thought.

On your skymap, it might show up unpronounceable place names you’ve never heard of and, unless you were particularly well informed, you would probably not have known that this patch of earth that you were flying over was at the heart of a vicious local conflict.

Looking beyond the sunflowers and into the wheat fields, you notice white flags attached to sticks and flapping gently in the wind. They’re everywhere. And once you’ve seen one your eyes are trained to see so many others.

They’ve been put here by the locals, mainly mining and farming families, who have tried to bestow a modicum of dignity on what has become the mass grave around their village.

This morning, this grave was a place of unspeakable desolation. The only sound you could hear was the sound of the wind and the buzzing of flies who have descended in ever greater numbers on their new found prey.

The air is still sweet with the smell of summer vegetation but it is mingled with the corrupting smell of death.

Here and there are the passengers who are almost inexplicably strapped into their seats. Well behaved obedient travellers who would follow the stewardess’ orders to keep on the seatbelts if they didn’t have to go to the loo.

Here and there too you see other trace elements of the normality we take for granted when we travel – a small video screen from a seat, cracked. A Lonely Planet guide book to the islands of Bali and Lombok. An oxygen mask, the kind that is supposed to pop out of the ceiling when the aircraft loses pressure.

An elegant lady’s shoe, presumably packed in anticipation of some party or other. A child’s playing cards, a Risk board game, and pile after pile of mangled clothes, cables and wires from the guts of the plane and, in between, waxen fleshed bodies that are mostly indistinguishable and always unfathomable.

All the time you try to imagine the unimaginable. The moment that the two worlds mutually oblivious to each other – the world of the rebel fighters and that of the passengers on MH17 – came together in a moment of death.

Was it a surface-to-air missile as widely believed? Was it fired by the pro-Russian rebels who are now guarding this mass grave? If so, I cannot imagine that they did this on purpose – knowingly targeting a civilian airliner. I can imagine them thinking that the plane in the sky was the kind of Ukrainian jet that has been used to bomb rebel held towns and cities.

A tragic accident was always going to happen under the current and inflamed circumstances in this neighbourhood. But who could have imagined an accident like this against this ill-fated airline on such a scale?

Follow Matt Frei on Twitter: @mattfrei