New Delhi, June 14 -- BRUSSELS - They went to Smolenskaya Square with a message. They left with a lecture.

The ambassadors of France, Britain, and Germany - Nicolas de Riviere, Nigel Casey, and Alexander Graf Lambsdorff - filed into Russia's Foreign Ministry on June 11, four days after their leaders had gathered in London with Volodymyr Zelensky to demand that Moscow come to the table. Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin met them. What followed, by any diplomatic measure, was not a negotiation. It was a scolding.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said its side had delivered, in its own words, an "objective assessment of the destructive policies" pursued by the three European governments - a phrase that, in Moscow's diplomatic vocabulary,...