Strobe Talbott went jogging in Bonn on Wednesday while the two-page Kosovo peace settlement he played a vital part in drafting was being presented to President Milosevic in Belgrade. There was no way the US Deputy Secretary of State would meet an indicted war criminal and shake his hand as did the two men, Mr Martti Ahtisaari and Mr Chernomyrdin, with whom Mr Talbott had spent long hours hammering out the ultimatum for the end to NATO air strikes.
Yet four years ago, Mr Talbott hosted an extraordinary dinner for Mr Milosevic and the Bosnian leader, Mr Alija Izetbegovic, in his home town of Dayton, Ohio. The mood at the dinner was "almost giddy", according to Richard Holbrooke, as Mr Talbott swapped Balkan jokes with his guests, who had come to the US for the negotiations which led to the Bosnian peace settlement.
Nelson Strowbridge Talbott the Third has come a long way from Dayton, where his father was an investment banker. At school during the Cuban missile crisis he became fascinated with Russia and learned the language. At Yale, he took his Master's degree in Russian literature and then headed for Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
As luck would have it, he ended up sharing rooms with another Rhodes scholar called Bill Clinton, who used to cook the eggs for breakfast while Mr Talbott worked on translating the Khruschev memoirs. Both opposed the Vietnam War but Mr Talbott did not have to dodge the draft as he was excused on medical grounds. In 1992, Mr Talbott confessed to "moral discomfort bordering on guilt" about the weak knee which kept him "out of the Mekong Delta but not the squash courts and playing fields of Oxford".
Mr Talbott travelled to Russia from Oxford for vacation visits and encouraged Clinton to do the same. He returned there as an intern for Time magazine and was able to make contacts with young dissident writers.
As a correspondent for Time for the next 22 years, Mr Talbott became an established Russian expert, but the Soviet authorities refused him a visa when he was appointed Moscow correspondent in retaliation for his translation of the Khruschev memoirs.
When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, he appointed his old room-mate as number two in the State Department and special adviser on Russia. Mr Talbott's deep knowledge of Russian language, culture and politics has been invaluable in the past months as the US worked hard to win Russia's support for the NATO campaign. Observers believe the sudden capitulation of President Milosevic was due in large part to his realisation that he could no longer count on Russia as a traditional ally of Serbia.
As Mr Talbott jogged around Bonn last Thursday he must have felt his love affair with Russia had stood him in good stead.