A former senior diplomat to Indonesia, John McCarthy, said the Abbott government had no choice but to react with "uncompromising displeasure".
The UK's former top climate diplomat at the foreign office, John Ashton, told the Guardian that the decision by Australia was puzzling.
The president made the talks a priority for his top diplomat, secretary of state John Kerry, in the hope of achieving a defining, and much-needed, foreign policy legacy.
One way out of the impasse, according to one European diplomat who has been closely monitoring the issue, would be if both sides could be persuaded to engage in "technical talks" after the ruling – as opposed to "negotiations" – to discuss a "special status" for Mitrovica North and its surrounding Serb enclave.
The senior Catholic cleric and former Vatican diplomat warned that the church should "not move into denial of the realities".
A Cuban government spokesman did not return calls seeking comment on Wednesday, but Josefina Vidal, Cuba's top diplomat for US affairs, recently ruled out any return of political refugees.
He studied English and joined the Soviet foreign service; after Belarus's independence in 1991, he served as a diplomat in the US and Switzerland.
Another diplomat said: "If he calls me Paddy again, I'll punch him".
As a diplomat, public servant and shadow minister, Rudd had an unhappy knack of making colleagues loathe him.
"For domestic political reasons, the Germans will only act in an absolute crisis," bemoaned another EU diplomat.
Now, like in the old days, it's an advantage for a Hungarian diplomat to have studied in Moscow Péter Krekó "It's beyond irony," said a senior figure in the European commission in Brussels.
