Donetsk: Movies are made of stuff like this. A high-flying couple on a freeway at night, forced to take a mysterious off-ramp that dumps them in a menacing part of the world – and it’s the cops and family and friends who go searching for them that end up dicing with death. So it was for Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop following the MH17 tragedy in which 298 died – 38 of them Australian.

Finding themselves in an absurd corner of the world, an active combat zone that calls itself the Donetsk People’s Republic, they called in 100-plus unarmed, combat-untrained Australian investigators who spent 10 days dodging bombs to search for 80 or 100 bodies of victims that might not have been there in the first place.

On Wednesday it dawned on them that this part of "bring ‘em home" had become Mission Impossible – and at the same time Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte gave an "aw-shucks" press conference.

Hinting that the combined Australian-Dutch-Malaysian investigators needn’t have been in harm's way in the first place, the Dutch leader revealed that information "recently" received from a Ukrainian military doctor who had supervised the early recovery operation "has changed the recovery team's perception of an earlier effort undertaken by local authorities".

That seemed like a convoluted way of saying there was a credibility problem with the estimate first of 100 bodies, and then of 80 bodies presumed to be still at the crash site after Dutch officials had assessed 200 or so body bags on a train which had been dispatched from the site by rebel fighters several days after the crash.

Canberra’s expressions of gratitude at the end of what it is now calling the first phase of the search were instructive. Prime ministerial envoy Angus Houston “express[ed] my sincere gratitude to the parties that have enabled access” to the crash site. But he mentioned only the Kiev government and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, nothing about the rebels.

They were the party that had control of the site and who, according to the OSCE, had been becoming more co-operative and more trusting of the investigators – but only until Kiev couldn’t stomach the rebels' growing stature as brokers of access to the site.

The deals for access, negotiated daily, started to fall apart only after Kiev, which Houston thanked for its "outstanding support", stepped up its military activity in the area in a bid to dislodge the rebels from the site.

And whatever Canberra was telling Kiev privately, it seemingly allowed itself to be taken hostage by Kiev, to the extent that it said nothing publicly.

There were stark diplomatic lessons for Canberra in this crisis.

While Abbott and Bishop opted for megaphone diplomacy against the rebels’ sponsors in Moscow, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak quietly made phone calls to the rebel leadership in Donetsk, in which he achieved essential outcomes – the release of the refrigerated train on which the rebels had stored the 200 or more bodies and the handing over to Malaysian officials of the Boeing 777’s black boxes, which are essential for crash investigators.

Canberra should not have put so much faith in Kiev.

Had it taken a leaf from the Malaysians' book and openly acknowledged the rebels, Kiev might have thought twice about cranking up its guns and the relative peace on the crash site might have lasted longer.

Bishop kept saying that Australia did not want to take sides, but she sort-of did.

Instead of acting on the basis that the rebels controlled the site and that it was in Australia’s interest to negotiate with them for the return of the victims' bodies and for investigators to have access to the site, the logic seemed to be that the people in Kiev must be nice, because they wanted to join our friends in the European club.

It followed that the eastern rebels had to be riff-raff because they wanted to join Vladimir Putin and his bovver boys in Moscow. Lost in that equation was that no one can be trusted here – Ukraine is not rated as one the most corrupt countries in the world for no reason.

In all the circumstances it never made sense to insert an investigative team into such a roiling conflict without a clear understanding with all parties, including the rebels.

Time will tell, but it seems now we’re being told that despite all the limitations and problems confronted by the investigators, the search went very well.

Why then is it that the hours spent actually searching each day has become something of a state secret? We know there were more bad days that good days – whole days were cancelled and there was one day when they spent just 30 minutes on the job.

But when I asked the Australian Federal Police for a day-by-day count of hours of actual searching, as opposed to sheltering out of harm's way, the initial “no probs, mate … you’ll have it this afternoon,” came back 24 hours later as: “Australia won’t be providing these figures.”

Maybe Abbott and Bishop should drop by the Ramada Hotel in Donetsk, where I’m writing this on the terrace – the coffee is good and the thump and rumble of incoming Ukrainian missiles is off in the middle distance. What I want to show them is the automatically programmed awning on the terrace – it retracts when the sun is at its brightest and extends when it is cloudy.

Been doing that for three weeks now. But that’s the way things work here and while we’re stuck at a rare overlapping of this part of the world and ours, maybe it will help us to understand that the only thing right about mission "bring ‘em home"’ was the sentiment.