The information out of Moscow is a little bit of non-news: Russia’s high diplomat continues to be in his job.
On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov moved to tamp down intense media hypothesis a few potential reshuffle on the highest echelon of Russian international coverage. The cause? Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s outstanding absence from a Russian Security Council assembly on Wednesday, when President Vladimir Putin floated the opportunity of full-scale nuclear testing.
“There is no truth to these reports whatsoever,” Peskov mentioned on a name with reporters Friday. “Lavrov continues to serve as foreign minister, of course.”
To clarify why that’s information, a little bit of Kremlinology is in order. On Wednesday, the Russian enterprise day by day Kommersant – citing “informed sources” – raised eyebrows by reporting that the veteran diplomat “was absent by agreement” from the high-level confab with Putin.
What’s extra, observers famous that Lavrov was the one everlasting member of the Security Council to overlook the assembly. And in parallel, it emerged that the international minister wouldn’t be main the Russian delegation to the G20 summit in Johannesburg later this month: Putin on November 4 signed a decree, appointing a extra junior official, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Maxim Oreshkin, to move up the delegation.
Inquiring minds rapidly requested: Was Lavrov on the outs with Putin, and was this an indication of a attainable shakeup contained in the Russian authorities?
News of Lavrov’s no-show got here simply a few weeks after the collapse of a plan for an in-person summit in Budapest between Putin and US President Donald Trump. Lavrov was Russia’s level man for making that occur, however after a cellphone name between Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the summit was placed on ice. US officers mentioned the Russians had not shifted from their maximalist position on Ukraine; the Trump administration adopted with fresh sanctions on Moscow.
But if there’s blowback in Moscow over an obvious diplomatic setback, the Kremlin seems eager to maintain any inside squabbles out of public view. Asked by NCS whether or not Lavrov was nonetheless serving, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova mentioned Lavrov was nonetheless in his put up; she confirmed his absence from Wednesday’s session, including, “but that happens.”
Lavrov has been the face of Russian diplomacy for over twenty years and beforehand served as Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations. He served Putin loyally via a interval of intense Russian confrontation with the West, from the temporary 2008 Russo-Georgian war and the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea to Moscow’s entry into the Syrian civil war in 2015. He has additionally been a full-throated defender of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The 75-year-old Lavrov has additionally honed a brash, confrontational fashion of diplomacy that has usually matched Putin’s imperial aspirations. At the latest summit in Anchorage, Alaska, with Trump, the Russian international minister arrived sporting a sweater emblazoned with the emblem CCCP, the Cyrillic initials for the Soviet Union.
But trolling might solely get you to date, particularly in terms of the Trump administration. After Trump signaled that the Budapest assembly was canceled, Kirill Dmitriev, the pinnacle of the Russian sovereign wealth fund and a Kremlin particular envoy, flew to the United States for what some observers noticed as a spherical of injury management.
Under Putin, nonetheless, loyalty and continuity are nonetheless prized. Last yr, as an example, the Kremlin introduced the substitute of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s long-serving minister of protection. But as an alternative of being fired outright for an absence of battlefield success, Shoigu was moved sideways to a put up because the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.
Even when confronted with main setbacks, it appears, the Kremlin chief’s response is usually a rearrangement of the deck chairs.
NCS’s Anna Chernova and Matthew Chance contributed reporting.