The past is an inexhaustible source of lessons. I am in France for a few weeks, and a debate agitates journalists, experts, commentators and diplomats on the advisability or not of starting a negotiation with Vladimir Putin about Ukraine. The matter is serious, especially since Ukrainians and Westerners fear a long war with undecided results.
The question seemed to have been settled when President Volodymyr Zelensky closed the door on any discussion with Putin following the discovery a few months ago of hundreds of corpses of Ukrainians executed after being tortured. The images of the mass graves went around the world and understandably hardened the attitude of public opinion and governments towards Russia. On television sets and in editorial sections, camps have formed. The front of the refusal to negotiate with Putin brings together almost everything that is spoken and written and occupies 99% of the places.
There are quite a few commentators who dare to think otherwise even if they are suspected of being pro-Russian or, even worse, of being Munichers, this stigma recalling those Western leaders who, meeting in Munich in 1938, thought they would obtain peace with Hitler sacrificing Czechoslovakia. Today, it’s Hitler/Putin against the rest of the world, so you have to choose sides.
The negotiating camp rejects this dichotomy. There are people just as intelligent as the camp opposite and who deserve to be listened to.
The academic Bertrand Badie, the geopolitical scientist Pascal Boniface, the sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté, the ex-diplomat Gérard Araud and a few others recall the obvious: to make peace, you do not negotiate with your friends (although sometimes it is necessary ), but with his enemies. And if we want to avoid the worst in this dirty war in Ukraine, we must not exclude anyone from the field of discussion.
The Milosevic case
The opposition camp believes that any contact with Putin is a form of renunciation and that eventually the West will come to terms with the dictator. It’s possible. History is thus made. However, there is at least one historical example where the West negotiated with an executioner to obtain peace and then seized him to bring him to justice: Slobodan Milosevic, one of the leaders of the former Yugoslavia.
Milosevic led Serbia from 1989 to 2000 during the dark decade when the former Yugoslavia broke up. He fanned the embers of ethnic nationalism in order to keep the country together, but faced with the determination of Croatia and Bosnia to become independent, he unleashed wars against these countries to wrest the Serb majority territories from them. After three years (1992-1995) of massacres and killings, Westerners, led by NATO, forced him to sign peace with his enemies during a ceremony in Paris under the presidency of Jacques Chirac.
Four years later, in 1999, he did it again by denying the Kosovars their independence. Again, NATO intervened by carrying out a bombing campaign against Serbian territory for three months while the Attorney General of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Louise Arbor, indicted the Serbian president for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Finally, in June 1999, Milosevic gave in. He withdrew his troops from Kosovo and agreed to end the war. Two years later, when he had just been defeated in the presidential election, the new government handed him over to NATO, which handed him over to the Tribunal.
No situation is alike. Russia is not Serbia and no one is seriously considering a NATO bombing campaign on Moscow to get Putin’s head.
In 1995, over Bosnia, and in 1999, over Kosovo, Western diplomacy sought the least bad option to obtain an end to the killings, peace and justice.
She achieved her three goals. And peace, albeit fragile, has reigned in the Balkans for a quarter of a century. It’s not nothing.
So the refusal camp may well wrap themselves in a moral posture that makes them look good on TV sets, but this is a “hypocritical attempt to look away from a world they don’t want to see” and which is more and more brutal, writes the ex-ambassador Araud in a column published by the weekly Point. Faced with Russia, we have no choice but to “speak with the devil”, he writes. With the hope that Ukraine will one day obtain an end to the killings, peace and justice.
* M. Coulon will publish at the beginning of March My France. Portraits and other considerations (Editions La Presse)