Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, said it was "ironic to say the least" that Russia produced the motion at the same time as it was "backing an all-out assault" in Ukraine despite the ceasefire.
Writing before the announcement that Australia was withdrawing its ambassador, he predicted the executions would affect Australians' perceptions of Widodo for the rest of his tenure, but warned against such a step.
He warned a decision to withdraw the ambassador could harm Australia's longer term goals.
Australia has never before withdrawn an ambassador in response to the death sentence being carried out on a citizen.
As David Ormsby-Gore, then Britain's ambassador to Washington, wrote to Jackie Kennedy: "He had great things to do and he would have done them".
Earlier this year, Xydakis roundly condemned the British Museum's decision rejecting a Unesco offer to help resolve the dispute more than 200 years after the sculptures were controversially removed from Athens' greatest temple, the Parthenon, by the seventh Earl of Elgin during his tenure as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
She was US representative to the UN General Assembly during late 1969 and went on to hold two US ambassador positions - as ambassador to Ghana from 1974-77 (under Gerald Ford) and to the then Czechoslovakia under George HW Bush from 1989-92.
Today at lunch retired US ambassador Frances Cook, who we knew in 1972 when she served in the consulate in Sydney, apologised for slight bruises under her eyes: she and everyone in politics, she explains, have plastic surgery – navy secretaries, congressmen, senators take cosmetic-surgery holidays in Thailand or South Africa.
He previously served as British ambassador in Yemen.
Last November the all-party Commons foreign affairs committee criticised the British ambassador to Manama for echoing the views of the Bahraini government.
"The current Russian arms transfers to Africa should not be interpreted the same way as they occurred under the Soviet Union," said David Shinn, former US ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.
