Meeting a Man Wanted for War Crimes, Daily Brief July 8, 2024

Imagine you’re the leader of your country… Would you meet with a leader from another country responsible for atrocities and wanted for war crimes?

This question has emerged twice in recent days, in separate top-level meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has key responsibility for ongoing Russian atrocities in Ukraine and is personally wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán met with Putin last week. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting Putin today and tomorrow.

Orbán’s face-to-face with the Russian president in Moscow on Friday brought a wave of condemnation from Hungary’s EU partners and fellow members of the ICC. This included a highly unusual statement from the head of EU foreign affairs, emphasizing it was purely a bilateral meeting between Hungary and Russia, not related to Hungary currently holding the EU’s rotating presidency.

Still, as my colleague, Iskra Kirova, noted, the meeting risked “being an affront to victims of grave abuses in Ukraine.”

Putin’s meeting with India’s Modi now brings up the same concern, with an additional angle for everyone in India with a sense of history. Writing for the Indian news outlet Scroll, HRW’s Meenakshi Ganguly and Rachel Denber reminded Modi:

“Russia’s tactics mirror those of colonial armies, something that the prime minister of a country that bore the brunt of colonialism should speak up against.”

Leaders have various strategies to try to confront the bad optics of meeting with people linked to atrocities. Both Orbán and Modi have already met with Putin since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, usually couching it in terms of peace efforts or claims they are mentioning Russia’s abuses privately.

Victims of Russian atrocities in Ukraine will hardly find such “silent diplomacy” encouraging, given its lack of results on the ground, where atrocities continue.

This brings us back to the general question – should you meet with such abusive leaders? – and perhaps also to a general answer.

What these meetings achieve for the abusive dictators is obvious: a photo op that helps them claim everything is normal, that they are not a pariah and fugitive from justice. Look, if these people are meeting with me, I can’t be as terrible as my enemies claim, right?

But what do such meetings achieve for the people getting slaughtered and tortured? The question, then, is not really whether to have a meeting or not, but what your aim in having the meeting is and what issues you will raise.

If a meeting with an abusive leader can be used to draw attention to victims’ suffering and call for atrocities to end – publicly, not ignorably privately – that might be worth having a meeting for.

Orbán failed that test last week. Let’s see how Modi does today and tomorrow.