French President Emmanuel Macron declined Wednesday to call the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine “genocide,” saying that “an escalation of rhetoric” would not help stop the war after both President Biden and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas used the term.
“What we can say for sure is that the situation is unacceptable and that these are war crimes,” Macron said. “We are living through war crimes that are unprecedented on our soil — our European soil.”
Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, blasted Macron’s remarks, saying his “unwillingness to recognize the genocide of Ukrainians after all the outspoken statements of [the] Russian leadership and criminal actions of [the] Russian military is disappointing.”
“ ‘Brotherly’ people do not kill children,” Nikolenko said, adding that “there is no moral, no real reason to conduct conversations about the ‘brotherly’ relations of Russian and Ukrainian peoples.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv on April 9 and met his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. (Video: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service, Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service)
Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the grisly scenes in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where bodies were discovered in every neighborhood after Russian troops retreated, did not “look far short of genocide.”
Wednesday was not the first time Macron has diverged from Biden’s comments on the war. Late last month, the French president cautioned against escalating the conflict through words or actions after his U.S. counterpart declared that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
In early March, Putin called Macron for a 90-minute discussion about Ukraine, but there was no diplomatic breakthrough.
“Your country will pay dearly because it will end up as an isolated country, weakened and under sanctions for a very long time,” Macron reportedly told Putin.
President Biden talked about why he called the war in Ukraine a “genocide” on April 12. “It sure seems that way to me,” he said. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: The Washington Post)
On Wednesday, Russia rejected Biden’s claims of “genocide” in Ukraine.
“We categorically disagree with them,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “We consider it unacceptable to attempt such a distortion of the situation.”
He added: “This is hardly acceptable for the president of the United States of America.”
The United Nations, which first recognized genocide as an crime under international law in 1946, defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
U.N. officials are judicious in using the term; the agency has noted that it is frequently misused “in referring to large scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations.” Only a few incidents have been defined as genocide by judicial bodies, the United Nations said, including the 1994 killings of the minority Tutsi in Rwanda.
Rick Noack in Paris contributed to this report.