Macron has a point about Russian war crimes

French President Emmanuel Macron tends to rock the boat whenever he opens his mouth, saying hard truths that many of his European colleagues, both at the state level and in the European Union’s gargantuan bureaucracy, would rather be left unsaid. Examples are legion: his insistence in 2019 that Nato was going ‘brain-dead’; his proclamation in June 2022 that Russia shouldn’t be humiliated if Europe wants to preserve working relations with Moscow after the war ends; or his comments last April urging Europe to grow a backbone and refrain from blindly following the United States into a confrontation with China over Taiwan.  

Macron’s May 31 speech at the Globsec conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, was designed in part to mitigate some of the chill his words have spread throughout the continent. On that score, Macron did well. He received a standing ovation in a part of Europe that is traditionally wary about France’s geopolitical intentions and can’t imagine French troops rushing to their defence in the event of Russian military action (not that such action is forthcoming anyway; it took Russia around ten months and 20,000 fatalities before the mid-sized Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was in its hands).