For him only, but not for the Russian media who were denied entry visas, the strict travel ban imposed on any Kremlin officials or apparatchiki was swept aside.
Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov, the longest-serving foreign minister of post-communist Russia, was after all a special case. A veteran diplomat, who served for ten years as Russia’s ambassador to the UN, in the eyes of the United Nations he was too important to be kept outside the door. What’s more, Russia, a nuclear superpower and one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with full veto powers, was by virtue of the rotation principle, the monthly president of the UNSC. As such, it would be up to Russia to set the agenda on international peace and security.
As a result, at the cost of allowing the Russians to score some points in the propaganda war, president Biden and his State Secretary Blinken clearly understood that in the current circumstances Lavrov simply could not be left out of the Security Council on the mere technicality of issuing a visa.
The deeply marginalized United Nations could only concur, arguing that Russia’s high-level involvement inside the Security Council was crucial. Moscow’s presence at this stage, the Secretary-General insisted, was literally vital.
The immediate priority, Guterres emotionally argued, given the impossibility to reach an agreement even on a limited ceasefire while the destruction of Ukraine continues, has to be at least to prevent yet another humanitarian disaster – massive starvation of millions, unless the soon to expire UN-sponsored grain shipment agreement from Russia and Ukraine was promptly renewed. In this charged climate of deeply strained multilateral relations, while Guterres with his professorial approach was talking about “recommitting the international community to its obligations under the UN Charter”, the wily Russian top diplomat, sitting just next to the Secretary-General, quickly grasped the opportunity to shift the debate to a different direction.
Lavrov, as not many people know, is the son of an Armenian from Tbilisi in Georgia by the name of Kalantaryan who married a Russian, Kaleria Lavrova. Armenians in Russia have a deserved reputation for sharp intelligence and for their ruthless skills in strategic thinking. Former US ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke once described Lavrov as “an unsurpassed diplomat who serves his country with intelligence, energy, and considerable arrogance”.
All of these qualities were on display at the Security Council meeting. The United Nations global system, Lavrov said, is now enduring a profound crisis whose root cause is that certain member states are seeking to replace international law and the Charter of the UN with a “rules-based order”. “No one has seen these rules”, he added. “The West continues its attempts to deter the natural process of establishing new, independent development centers”.
Underscoring that “nobody allowed the Western minority to speak on behalf of all the humankind”, Lavrov provided an overview of the “criminal misadventures” of the United States: from NATO intervention in Serbia, to Afghanistan and Iraq. Democracy, he asserted, “emanates from the Charter of the United Nations whose first words reflect the fundamental source of legitimate power – the consent of the governed”. “The Kiev regime”, he concluded without providing any evidence, “does not meet this test”.
As for the Russian “special military operation” (i.e. the aggression of Ukraine) the issue according to Lavrov “should not be considered separately from the geopolitical context to eradicate threats to domestic security created for years by NATO along Moscow’s borders”. The ‘spetsoperatsiya’, he argued sardonically with a straight face, was unavoidable – to prevent a NATO aggression on Russian soil, and above all, to “protect the [Russian] people from the actions of the Kiev illegal Nazi regime”.
There is ample reason to suspect that the man flown from Moscow did not believe a single word of what he said. Lavrov is not stupid. He is far more sophisticated than Putin, an ersatz “historian” and armchair strategist, who botched up the Ukrainian invasion, sees himself as another Peter the Great, and is an open admirer of Stalin.
But Lavrov knows also that he is not in Putin’s inner circle. He was sent to New York with a very precise mission: defending the indefensible. In this cynical ruthless logic, to survive in the Kremlin, one has no alternative but to deliver the goods. Nothing more and nothing less.
At the UN session, Lavrov failed to convince anyone of the Russian aggression masquerading as self-defense, let alone on the Putinist false claim that Ukraine is a “Nazi regime illegally set up by a coup”. That however was sheer nonsense spread around, to create a smokescreen and reassure the boss back home.
In this warped logic, Lavrov just bought time for the Russian regime while protecting his own political skin. But he partly succeeded in confusing the issue, by raising some valid points that, as a veteran of the UN, he knew inside out. And that indeed in America are widely debated even in the latest issue of ‘Foreign Affairs’. The UN structure does not reflect the 21th century reality. It is an anachronism.
