Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s absence sets off alarm bells in Moscow
The news out of Moscow is a bit of non-news: Russia’s top diplomat is still in his job.
On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov moved to tamp down intense media speculation about a potential reshuffle at the highest echelon of Russian foreign policy. The reason? Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s prominent absence from a Russian Security Council meeting on Wednesday, when President Vladimir Putin floated the possibility of full-scale nuclear testing.
“There is no truth to these reports whatsoever,” Peskov said on a call with reporters Friday. “Lavrov continues to serve as foreign minister, of course.”
To explain why that’s news, a bit of Kremlinology is in order. On Wednesday, the Russian business daily 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 more, observers noted that Lavrov was the only permanent member of the Security Council to miss the meeting. And in parallel, it emerged that the foreign minister would not be leading the Russian delegation to the G20 summit in Johannesburg later this month: Putin on November 4 signed a decree, appointing a more junior official, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Maxim Oreshkin, to head up the delegation.
Inquiring minds quickly asked: Was Lavrov on the outs with Putin, and was this a sign of a possible shakeup inside the Russian government?
News of Lavrov’s no-show came just a couple of 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 point man for making that happen, but after a phone call between Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the summit was put on ice. US officials said the Russians had not shifted from their maximalist position on Ukraine; the Trump administration followed with fresh sanctions on Moscow.
But if there is blowback in Moscow over an apparent diplomatic setback, the Kremlin appears keen to keep any internal squabbles out of public view. Asked by CNN whether Lavrov was still serving, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Lavrov was still in his post; she confirmed his absence from Wednesday’s session, adding, “but that happens.”
Lavrov has been the face of Russian diplomacy for over two decades and previously served as Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations. He served Putin loyally through a period of intense Russian confrontation with the West, from the brief 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 also been a full-throated defender of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukrain
The 75-year-old Lavrov has also honed a brash, confrontational style of diplomacy that has often matched Putin’s imperial aspirations. At the recent summit in Anchorage, Alaska, with Trump, the Russian foreign minister arrived wearing a sweater emblazoned with the logo CCCP, the Cyrillic initials for the Soviet Union.
But trolling may only get you so far, especially when it comes to the Trump administration. After Trump signaled that the Budapest meeting was canceled, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund and a Kremlin special envoy, flew to the United States for what some observers saw as a round of damage control.
Under Putin, however, loyalty and continuity are still prized. Last year, for instance, the Kremlin announced the replacement of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s long-serving minister of defense. But instead of being fired outright for a lack of battlefield success, Shoigu was moved sideways to a post as the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.
Even when faced with major setbacks, it seems, the Kremlin leader’s response is often a rearrangement of the deck chairs.
