Last week, ambassadors from the so-called E3 — France, Germany and the UK — made a rare visit to Moscow to discuss ending its invasion of Ukraine. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s pugnacious foreign minister, didn’t deign to receive them; his deputy instead lectured them with “an objective assessment of the destructive policies of the West.”
Objectively, Russia is doing the destroying. Objectively, Lavrov — let alone his deputy — is out of the loop when it comes to the Kremlin’s negotiations on Ukraine. Objectively, once again, the ambassadors’ delivery of Ukrainian peace terms and call for direct Moscow-Kyiv talks was never going to work. This was a doomed mission that seemed only to provide further evidence of Europe’s geopolitical incapacity and irrelevance. But the ambassadors and their leaders did the right thing: We need more such visits.
