Emmanuel Macron is not as soft on Russia as his critics claim

August in france is a month when diaries empty faster than a glass of chilled rosé in Saint-Tropez. Emmanuel Macron, though, is not the sort to lie idly on the beach, even on holiday. On day one this week at his official residence on the Mediterranean the French president was already on the phone to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. It was in August three years ago that Mr Macron hosted Vladimir Putin on the Med. Clutching a bouquet of flowers, the Russian leader bounded up the stone steps to greet him. To the consternation of those who considered Mr Putin even then to be thoroughly infréquentable, the visit served as confirmation that Mr Macron’s approach to Russia was at odds with that of much of the rest of Europe.

The memory of this charm offensive frames the way others judge Mr Macron’s approach to Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine. If Germany erred by failing to see the geopolitical risk posed by its reliance on cheap Russian gas, France’s mistake was to think right up until the eve of war that it could sweet-talk Mr Putin into better behaviour. No Western leader has spoken to Mr Putin more often than Mr Macron (19 times this year). No other Western leader called before the war for a “new security architecture” to include Russia, nor after it started urged allies not to “humiliate” Russia. As the war drags on and Europeans feel the energy crunch, no Western leader is as readily suspected by some of his own friends of wanting to push Ukraine into suing for peace.