A Room in Vienna That Washington Did Not Book
In July, in a private room in Vienna, three men who used to run European foreign policy sat down with a former Kremlin official whose name has still not been made public. Tim Barrow, who until recently was Britain’s national security adviser, was there. So was Markus Ederer, formerly Germany’s state secretary for foreign affairs and the European Union’s ambassador to Russia. So was Pierre Vimont, the French diplomat who once served as the top civil servant running the European Union’s foreign service. None of them holds office today. None of them was sent by a government. Yet the meeting they held, organised through the Geneva based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, follows a similar contact between former German and Russian officials in Baku that Azerbaijan’s president disclosed in July, and it points to something bigger than a single dinner among retired officials: European capitals building a channel to Moscow that does not run through Washington.
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