“You can dance with Russia and you’ll even get something out of it. But you certainly can’t tango with Lavrov, because he’s not authorized to do so,” said Rex Tillerson, US Secretary of State during the beginning of Donald Trump’s administration, in 2017. Trump on Sergei Lavrov.
Such is the loyalty of the Russian foreign minister to Vladimir Putin that it is difficult to extract anything from him without the Russian president’s consent, Tillerson said.
That, after all, has been holding Lavrov back for almost 18 years, since he took over Russian diplomacy in 2004 — to give you an idea, Tillerson was just one of seven US secretaries of state to hold the post during the Russian period in from Colin Powell to Antony Blinken, through Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo.
Over the past five decades as a diplomat, first for the Soviet Union and later for Russia, Lavrov has earned respect, power and money — and has seen that melt away since he became responsible for defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine around the world, which began on the 24th of December. February.
Money, at least for now, is frozen. A day after the start of the war, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada applied sanctions against Lavrov, as well as against Putin himself, with the freezing of assets – for the US, the two are also prohibited from traveling.
But the most symbolic episode of this low moment occurred on Monday (28), with a sequence of embarrassments. The first was when he did not travel to Geneva to attend meetings of the UN Human Rights Council and the Conference on Disarmament, which discussed the war.
At least officially, the trip was canceled “due to an unprecedented ban on its flight in the airspace of a number of European Union countries, which have imposed sanctions against Russia”, the Russian mission to the UN said. According to the country’s news agencies, the Portuguese Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, even tried to negotiate so that the Moscow emissary could make the trip, without success.
Lavrov then spoke via recorded video, in which he denounced the travel ban, which he said was used by European leaders to “escape a face-to-face dialogue, which they are clearly afraid of”.
But few people listened to the complaints, as in both speeches, dozens of diplomats got up and left the room as the recordings were shown, in protest against Russian actions in Ukraine.
The scene was something previously unthinkable for Lavrov, considered an ace of diplomacy and who for more than ten years was Russia’s ambassador to the same UN, from 1994 to 2004, where he used to have a reputation as a good negotiator and talked well with journalists from around the world. .
But his reputation has changed over the years since he took command of Russian diplomacy. Like the boss, Lavrov has been reverting to a certain Cold War rhetoric and seems nostalgic for the days when Russia ruled. On Wednesday (2), for example, he said that a Third World War would involve nuclear weapons and that “it is necessary to put an end to the arrogant philosophy of the West of thinking itself superior”. Speeches like this are repeated with some frequency.
Born in 1950 in Moscow to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, the minister is from the same generation as Putin. He inherited the nickname “Mr. Niet” (Mr. No) from Soviet Chancellor Andrei Gromiko, who held the post for 28 years. The joke, disguised as criticism, is that he only knows how to say “no” in negotiations — and thus he has accumulated diplomatic victories for the Kremlin.
One of them was after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Although Russia has suffered some sanctions and been expelled from the G8, Lavrov’s performance was considered successful in having avoided the complete isolation of Moscow – the current war has made clear how the retaliation can go much further, with sanctions on the president himself, for example.
In addition, Russian military intervention in the civil war in Syria in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime is considered fundamental in maintaining the dictator in power, even when opposed by the United States.
Also under his management, he managed to gain allies from all ideological spectrums for the Kremlin – from the explicit support of the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro, to the sympathy of the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.
But it was by not very diplomatic customs that Lavrov became popular within Russia, to the point that today it is possible to find T-shirts with his face in souvenir shops in Moscow and on the internet.
In 2008, he allegedly used profanity with then-UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, according to British media, in an argument over who started the war in Georgia.
“Who the fuck are you to want to lecture me?” Lavrov would have said. At a time of less heated tempers, the expletive said in high-ranking diplomatic conversations took a wrong turn, and the Kremlin rushed to explain itself.
Lavrov seems to have a particular fondness for the British, and last month, two weeks before the start of the war in Ukraine, he played a prank on the current head of British diplomacy, Liz Truss.
In a meeting, he asked if she recognized Russian sovereignty in Rostov and Voronezh, which are part of Russia itself – there is no diplomatic issue involving the regions. But the British diplomat fell into the trap and said no, that the UK did not recognize Russian sovereignty in those areas.
It was enough for Lavrov to deride her colleague and say that the West doesn’t understand the conflict in Ukraine. “I’m honestly disappointed that we had a conversation between a mute and a deaf. Our more detailed explanations fell on unprepared ground,” he said after the meeting.
