He has been in the Russian cabinet for 18 years, longer than any other minister. Sergey Lavrov is tall and, despite his 71 years, stands bolt upright at press conferences if necessary. He is a soccer player, smoker and guitar player. His calm bass and dry sarcasm make him as much a hallmark of Russian diplomacy as Andrei Gromyko was for Soviet diplomacy. If you didn’t know you were dealing with a foreign minister, you might think this Russian with the rimless glasses is a professor of physics or a musician in a symphony orchestra.
Sergei Lavrov, born in Moscow in 1950, went to an elite school with in-depth English classes. The fact that he became a diplomat may also be due to his family history, which reflects the multi-ethnic culture of the Soviet Union. The father was an Armenian from Tbilisi in Georgia, his mother a Russian who worked for decades in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. After graduating from school, the young Lavrov entered the Moscow Diplomatic Academy MGIMO, where he studied international relations and Sinhala. Thanks to his language skills, his first appointment as secretary of an embassy took him to Sri Lanka, the South Asian island state with good relations with the Soviet Union at the time. In 1981 he moved to the Western Hemisphere to the Permanent Mission of the USSR to the United Nations. From 1994 he represented the Russian Federation as ambassador to the UN headquarters in New York for a decade and had a seat on the Security Council. He spoke in special sessions of the body after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. And he was present when the first UN mandate for the ISAF organizations in Afghanistan was decided at the end of December 2001.
In Moscow, Lavrov never had the smack of being a “Westerner,” which may be one of the reasons Vladimir Putin appointed him foreign minister in 2004. The duo of Putin, Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu can currently be confidently described as Russia’s political leadership. Until the start of the war in Ukraine, all three stood for a course that advocated dialogue with the West but pressed for substantial progress on key issues. The ministry led by Lavrov has long sought the expertise of Russian think tanks that develop strategies and advocate the agenda of a multipolar world in which power and influence are shared among multiple centers.
Sergey Lavrov with a rough tone and harsh rhetoric
At the memorable meeting of the Russian Security Council on February 21, which was broadcast live on Pervy Kanal, Lavrov supported the recognition of the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, as well as the move of his own military units to the Donbass. Speaking directly after President Putin, he declared that the Russian proposals for security guarantees had “wiped the table off” Western states. Instead, “secondary points were accepted from the Russian proposals that allow the dialogue to continue”, but the most important issue has always been sidelined by the US and its allies: “the question of the reckless expansion of NATO”. Lavrov’s harsh tone seemed at odds with his months of diplomatic agility, but by then the decision to invade Ukraine had long since been made. When the tanks rolled, one remembered that the Russian state had used abrupt violence before to set examples that were considered unavoidable, such as in the two Chechen wars in 1996 and between 1999 and 2009 Russia’s existence threatened. Separatism and radical Islamism financed by Arab countries threatened to spread. A military strike back was considered the ultima ratio of state power without exploring any possible options for a non-violent solution.
A day after his statement in the Kremlin, Lavrov stuck to his harsh rhetoric on the Rossiya 24 TV channel. Kyiv has “publicly stated for the past seven years that it will not implement the Minsk Agreement”. This means that “the efforts of European countries to restore peace in Donbass were not worth a penny”.
Radical foreign policy decisions by Soviet leaders were sometimes accompanied by changes in the Foreign Ministry. Maxim Litvinov had to give way to Vyacheslav Molotov in April 1939 when Stalin considered rapprochement with Germany opportune. Mikhail Gorbachev believed that his opening to the West with a chief diplomat like Andrei Gromyko did not appear credible enough and replaced him in 1985 with Eduard Shevardnadze. For Sergey Lavrov there is no prospect of resignation in view of the temporary waiver of diplomacy in the Ukraine question. Many observers in Germany believe they know that the decision to invade was a self-empowerment of Putin. However, if you take a closer look, you will see that nothing fits between the president and his foreign minister.
Western countries are currently obsessed with sanctions against his country, Lavrov said at the beginning of the week before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. He complained to an almost empty auditorium. Most of the diplomats had long since left the meeting room in a previously coordinated action.