"God, it's like it was yesterday," Julie Bishop says.

The Foreign Minister is recalling the morning of July 18 last year as she sat in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney and watched TV images of pro-Russian separatists 15,000 kilometres away picking through belongings of victims of the downing of flight MH17.

Bishop describes feeling an "overwhelming sense of revulsion" and resolving that whatever it took, "we had to get access to that site as soon as possible".

What followed was far from a straightforward affair, rather a remarkable case study in creative, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants diplomacy. But within four days Bishop, thrown together with her Dutch counterpart Frans Timmermans, had a UN resolution backing access to the site. Within a fortnight, Australian officials were standing on the field in eastern Ukraine among the Malaysia Airlines plane's wreckage.

The Abbott government's National Security Committee of Cabinet had decided within hours of the tragedy that international backing in the form of a UN resolution was needed to safeguard access to the crash site so that victims' remains could be retrieved and a proper investigation could begin.

Bishop left immediately for New York, the quickest available flights being through Tokyo and Washington. During the stopover in Tokyo she began speaking with victims' families, including the Maslins, who lost their three children and the kids' grandfather.

It was "shocking and it upsets me even thinking about it now", Bishop recalls, but that heartbreaking conversation also gave her a focal point for what was to become a key meeting in New York with Vitaly Churkin, Moscow's Ambassador to the UN.

Before Churkin arrived at the Australian Consul-General's office in Manhattan, Bishop strategically laid out copies of Australian newspapers with the horror headlines about the tragedy.

It was a "pretty heated discussion", with Moscow at that point refusing to back the resolution co-authored by Australia calling for unfettered access to the site. Bishop pivoted and began talking about the victims, specifically the conversation she'd had with the Maslins.

"He got very teary and said, 'I've got children too', and I think that was a turning point … When he left that meeting, I felt that we had the Russians but I couldn't be sure. I didn't believe until I actually saw his hand go up [in the UN chamber]."

With the resolution in place it was now a question of making sure it was implemented. Bishop flew to Kiev with Timmermans​.

By July 23 they were meeting with Ukraine's leaders who promised a parliamentary resolution to get around a constitutional ban on foreign troops entering the country.

Thinking they had a deal, Bishop went to the city of Kharkiv, where bodies of victims were starting to arrive by train, and then onto the Netherlands, to which Australian remains were flown by RAAF C-17s.

Then the news came through that the parliament in Kiev had broken for the summer recess – there was no resolution.

"So we turned around and flew back again and turned up and made complete nuisances of ourselves," Bishop says. "We had to get them to recall the parliament."

With a sitting date in place, Bishop and Timmermans​ realised they had no idea whether the Ukrainian government had actually secured a majority. What if the pro-Russian MPs banded together to scupper the plan?

"We then had to be the government whips and go around and start seeing MPs. All of a sudden we're sitting there, poring over Wikipedia and anything else we could find to pick out who are the parties and how many votes have they got … We had to go vote by vote … We had to work out Ukrainian parliamentary procedure. Do you need an absolute majority or a simple majority?"

This was all happening without an Australian embassy in Ukraine. However the cavalry was continuing to arrive, led by the venerable former Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Angus Houston.

They would hold NSC meetings at 3am Ukraine time and then Bishop and Houston would make the team go for a jog about 5am.

Ukraine's parliament approved access to armed Australian police on July 30 but the separatists then insisted they be unarmed. Australia and the Netherlands acquiesced despite their discomfort.

But access to the site remained uncertain. Here the "shadowy" hand of Moscow could be felt, Bishop says.

"We'd think we had an agreement [with the separatists] to get to a particular checkpoint and then you'd find they'd refuse to let us through … At one point when we just couldn't get past a checkpoint, I rang Prime Minister Abbott and said, 'Please, you have to put in a call to Putin.' So Tony did and Putin got the message … and within an hour the checkpoint allowed us through. You can join the dots."

For Bishop and for the Australian government, the dots were joined early on. When Bishop met with Russia's Ambassador to Australia back in Sydney on the very first day, he told her MH17 had clearly been shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile, only he insisted it was fired by Ukrainian forces.

Since then, Moscow has proposed other theories, particularly that the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian jet.

"It was interesting that three o'clock on that day he told me it had been shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile," she says.

Bishop says that nothing she's seen since then – and she's received a lot of intelligence briefings particularly from the US – has dissuaded her from the view MH17 was shot down by pro-Kremlin forces using a Buk.

The goal now is to get a fresh UN resolution that would set up an international tribunal to prosecute suspects. Australia, along with other nations who lost citizens, fear that once a much-anticipated Dutch Safety Board investigation recommends prosecutions against pro-Kremlin separatists and even Russian nationals, Moscow will wield its veto power in the UN Security Council to stop a tribunal.

Instead, Bishop wants the tribunal resolution in place before the expected October release of the Dutch report, while the question of suspects is still notionally an open one.

And again, Moscow is resisting.