When the dust finally settles in the senseless Ukrainian war, politicians in the West will be quick to calculate winners and losers and firmly putting themselves in the first category. But right though this madness which is inching its way to the third month, if there has been one leader who has shown maturity in spite of all electoral pressures, it has been the President of France, Emmanuel Macron. It is not that he has refused to join the bandwagon led by US President Joseph Biden in condemning the Russian invasion, but in a constant refrain that upping the verbal rhetoric is not serving the purpose.

“ I wouldn’t use terms like that because I’m still in talks with President Putin,” Macron appeared to warn after Biden labelled his Russian counterpart as a “butcher” during a meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Poland towards the end of March. But in the last few weeks the US President seems to be in a race with himself to better his characterisations of Putin — a war criminal, a murderous dictator, a pure thug and a man without a soul. And recently Biden maintained that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a genocide.

“Yes, I called it genocide. It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian”, Biden told reporters in Iowa.

Macron’s initiatives

But Macron saw it differently and in the process made it abundantly clear that he was not interested in getting into playing with words, rather stopping the war. “I would be cautious with such words because these two peoples (Russians and Ukrainians) are brothers”, Macron told the public broadcaster France 2. “What we can say for sure is that the situation is unacceptable and that these are war crimes. We are living through war crimes that are unprecedented on our soil — our European soil”, he added.

Macron has said on an earlier occasion that his job was to first get a ceasefire and then a total withdrawal of Russian troops by diplomacy. “If we want to do that, we can’t escalate either in words or actions”, he maintained.

The problem for Biden is that almost nothing seems to work domestically; in spite of all that tough rhetoric against Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, Democrats are seeing the President’s foreign policy approval rating — including that of his handling of Ukraine — at a low 41 to 42 per cent.

More shocking is that Biden’s latest approval rating is pegged at 33 per cent, according to one survey, almost a sure indication that Democrats are literally on the verge of losing in the upcoming off year elections this November in the House of Representatives where they hold a 12 seat advantage now and writing off the tie in the Senate where the Republicans are looking for only one seat to become the majority. And it is unlikely that even a visit by President Biden or his Vice-President Kamala Harris to Ukraine as a show of solidarity is going to matter on November 8 — foreign policies have rarely mattered in American elections and that too at mid-term shows.

The more the US and the West in general talk about war crimes and/or genocide, the sharper is going to be the comeback rhetoric from Moscow and in the process downscaling what little progress is being made in formal and back channel negotiations. On more than one occasion Russia has made it clear that the West has no right to talk on the subject and must take a look at its own track record in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

In fact even as early as 1970 there was the conviction that the US had indulged in war crimes in Vietnam, not just because of Lt. William Calley’s cold blooded My Lai Massacre that gunned down innocent men, women and children but in the liberal use of free fire zones, forced repatriation and relocation of civilians and collusion with the South Vietnamese in acts of brutality against the so-called aggressors who in many instances were innocent people.

And then there have been many instances where the West was seen either complicit or mere spectators at mass killings, pogroms and genocides — the brutal killing of an estimated two million Cambodians at the hands of a lunatic Pol Pot , the Shabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees and Rwanda have all been pointed out as examples of erstwhile blood soaked hands now screaming bloody murder.

The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals established the fact that the top echelons of civilian and military leaderships cannot disappear or get away by saying they were only acting on orders “from the top”. At the same time history has shown as to who stands to gain in a victor versus the vanquished scenario. In the 1970 classic that is read even today Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Telford Taylor who was the chief prosecutor at the trials argues that the principles of Nuremberg were not followed in Vietnam, a position he held till he died in 1998 at the age of 90.

There is one argument, notably in the West, that President Putin has bungled in his so called “Special Operations” in the Ukraine. For one thing he has apparently miscalculated the extent of resistance of the local people; and for another in the unity of the West.

The conflicting claims on the military front aside — the truth will be somewhere in between — the argument has been that the biting sanctions have started to tell on the Russian economy which will have severe long term implications though not on an immediate free fall. But for sure Moscow will be hedging its bets on European unity on Russia sanctions especially on the energy front.

NATO’s expansion

But the larger question that politicians, academics and strategists will have to address is the sequence of events that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and to ask the question if the ongoing madness could have been avoided. One of the things that was supposed to have been discussed as the former Soviet Union was falling apart in 1991 was the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, founded in 1949 with 12 members.

Just as how the US had been adamant against the positioning of Soviet missiles in Cuba — seen as the American backyard — and prepared for a nuclear showdown in 1962, Russia, especially since the time of Vladimir Putin, had been wary of any missiles in its front yard and had consistently sought security guarantees. With the former East European allies and close neighbours joining NATO that now numbers 30 states, Moscow was not going to allow Kyiv to head in that direction.

The supreme irony is that after grumbling that no country has directly come to the assistance of Ukraine and that its people are doing it on their own, Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to rule out his country in the NATO after all.

“It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of Nato; we understand this”, Zelensky said in March. “For years we heard about the apparently open door, but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged”, he added.

Perhaps Putin is looking at a formalisation of security guarantees; and Zelensky on secured borders. And these are no doubt difficult issues that will have to be sorted out in a sane fashion; not by name calling.

As a senior diplomat once told this writer, “Successful diplomacy means that you should allow the other fellow to walk away with something from the table”. The flip side to this is that the self styled maxim “What is mine is mine and what is yours is also mine” is clearly not going to work.

The writer was a senior foreign correspondent in Washington for 14 years covering North America and the UN

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