Who is Sergei Lavrov? Vladimir Putin’s No1 mouthpiece

If you somehow find your way to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, you’ll find a shop hawking t-shirts printed with the scowling face of Sergei Lavrov. Alongside ‘patriot merch’ featuring a winking caricature of Vladimir Putin, Lavrov, the splenetic foreign minister, quivers on tees printed with the quips and barbs he’s made: “f***ing morons” and “The conversation we’re having turns out to be a bit like deaf talking to blind” – his put down to UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

“He’s a hero,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian  investigative journalist, “Well, he’s not. But that’s the way propaganda portrays him; he’s the tough guy who knows how to say f*** off to everybody.” In the last fortnight, Lavrov —  once respected as “the most formidable foreign minister in the world” per The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Oborne — has pushed Putin’s dystopian narrative to the brink: “We didn’t even attack Ukraine,” he said at a presser in Turkey today; “the West is plotting a nuclear strike on Russia”; Ukraine is run by “neo-Nazis and drug addicts”; the Kremlin is engaged not in a bloody war but a “special military operation” to prevent genocide. At the UN in Geneva last week, Moscow deployed Lavrov on video to baselessly rail against the West; hundreds of diplomats staged a walkout. A day later, he lashed out at “emotional” journalists and compared America to “Napoleon and Hitler”. He is “largely out there to be rude to foreigners these days”, says one former high level UK security adviser. “He’s very much his master’s voice.”

Lavrov’s job is to deliver his President’s messages to the world with a brutal, no-nonsense style. But he is much more than just Putin’s No1 spokesman. He has been at the top of Russia’s foreign ministry for more than fifty years, a grizzled master of diplomacy who worked through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the thaw with the West and back to square one again. He’s also thought to own hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of property and other assets, and a report published last year revealed that he has bankrolled the careers and personal lives of a secret mistress and her family.

Others paint a more complicated picture. “He’s one of the last deeply Soviet diplomatic figures”, says Ben Judah, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe. Born in Tblisi, Georgia, 71 years ago, Lavrov is a product of the late Soviet empire: His intelligentsia parents – Russian mother, Georgian father – raised him on a diet of subtle internationalism. The prodigious Sergey Kalantaryan, as he was then, was picked out for Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the revered diplomatic finishing school at the heart of Russia. He speaks Russian, English, French, Sri Lanka’s Sinhala and Dhivehi, the official language of the Maldives, is a flawless technocrat and boasts an astonishing memory.  At the Russian Foreign Ministry, atop the ornate, rococo ‘Seven Sisters’ skyscrapers in Moscow, he quickly climbed the ladder. By 32, Lavrov had swapped Moscow for New York, as senior adviser to the USSR’s United Nations mission; by 42, he’d been named deputy foreign minister by Andrey Kozyrev, the only pro-Western Foreign Minister that Russia’s ever had. Over six-foot tall and heavy set, he towered on the international stage. “He is very charismatic,” one source says. “All the young foreign ministry girls fancied him 15 years ago. He had a lot of silver fox charisma going for him.”

He’s also capable of immense charm and humour. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov bonded with over a shared love of ice hockey. When he and Lavrov managed to finally wrap up marathon 13-hour talks on Syria, they celebrated by bringing journalists pizza and vodka. “The pizza is from the Americans, the vodka is from us,” Lavrov said. In New York Lavrov shared jokes and indiscretions with journalists — often with a whisky and a cigarette in hand, defying a smoking ban imposed by Kofi Annan, then secretary-general. Annan, declared Lavrov, “doesn’t own this building”. He writes poetry, sings songs on guitar with friends and eagerly took part in skits with other diplomats at international events when Russia’s ties with the West were less rancorous. But the transatlantic thaw froze over. Putin appointed Lavrov to the post of Foreign Minister in 2004 (four years after his first election). In March 2009, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, presented her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with a yellow plastic box featuring a red button marked ‘reset’ in English. But the State Department had made a basic translation error when labelling the button in Russian: instead of perezagruzka it read peregruzka – not ‘reset’, but ‘overload’. Today, Lavrov plays to the home crowd. His office begin the day by picking over the Russian tabloids like Komsomolskaya Pravda, and only later move to international broadsheets like the New York Times. It’s a canny way of analysing Russian Foreign Policy for its impact on domestic and Putin’s politics first.

Once, the West viewed him warmly as a man of principle and an impressive operator. “Lavrov was a respected and effective Russian Ambassador to the UN in the 90s,” says retired diplomat Sir Kim Darroch, a close adviser to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. “But over his two decades as Russian Foreign Minister he has become a reincarnation of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister of the Cold War. And his role now seems reduced to saying ‘No’ to foreigners, defending the indefensible, and trying to justify one of the most tragic and catastrophic decisions in history.” Lavrov’s old boss, Kozyrev, was just as damning. “Lavrov, rightfully sanctioned by the US and EU today, was my deputy in the 90s,” he tweeted the day after Russia’s invasion. “Used to have my back. Today, I would watch my back if he was behind me.” He has reportedly grown rich on his most recent boss’s payroll. A report from Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) last year, entitled “Yachts, bribes and a mistress: What Minister Lavrov is hiding,” detailed a plethora of luxury digs and yachts enjoyed by Lavrov.

Lavrov has been married to Maria Lavrova for fifty years and has a daughter, Ekaterina. But Navalny’s team allege that a second “unofficial wife”, actress and a restaurateur Svetlana Polyakova, enjoys real estate in Russia and the UK worth about $13.6 million, as well as a fleet of luxury cars worth a total of about $545,000. Glamorous “Stepdaughter” Polina Kovaleva, 26, studied went to a private boarding school in Bristol before gaining a first-class degree in economics with politics at Loughborough University and later completing a master’s in economics and strategy for business at Imperial College London.

She went on to work for Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, lives in a huge “award-winning” £4.4m apartment just off Kensington High Street and loves to party. “Her instagram feed looks like a non-stop holiday,” tweeted Maria Pevchikh, head of the ACF’s investigative unit. “Putin’s cronies often have two families at the same time.” Daughter Ekaterina, now 40, grew up in New York between the ages of four and 21, when her father worked there. She attended Columbia University in New York, studying political science, a masters at the London School of Economics, before entering the art world. She’s married to a Cambridge-educated Russian banker, Alexander Vinokurov, and they’re thought to live in Moscow with their two children.

“Lavrov knows all the tricks of wrong-footing a person he’s dealing with,” says one former security adviser. “He’s a sophisticated operator. He uses his size and aura to get you on your own.”  “Lavrov and Putin in rhetorical terms are very much on the same wavelength,” says Sergei Radchenko, a historian. “It’s part of the broader culture that we’ve seen flourish under Putin, a culture underpinned by fundamental cynicism and a very dark view of human nature; sarcastic and extremely cynical.” Lavrov subjected David Miliband, then UK Foreign Secretary, to a four-letter rant in 2004 at the height of the Georgia crisis; is beloved by Russians for muttering “f***ing morons” at a press conference with the Saudis at the height of the Syria crisis in 2014. “It projects a sense of Russian superiority,” says Sergei Radchenko, a historian, one tailored for a domestic audience. “He has three modes,” says Judah. “Sometimes he’s performing for Russian TV, and that’s when he does his snaps. Sometimes he’s performing for that foreign country’s TV, and then it’s all pretty Soviet, international brotherhood language. And sometimes he’s performing for Putin, because he knows that Putin’s watching, and he goes into killer mode.”

Most Russia watchers say that it’s clear Lavrov has “sold his soul to the devil”. “I’m not even sure he remembers what he was like when he was his own man,” one tells me. But Lavrov’s also aided and abetted a man that many call a war criminal. “My question to people who are much closer to the action is why hasn’t he just resigned?”, says Ben Noble of University College London.  “Lavrov is now a decidedly secondary character, and has been for quite a while.” He, like others, points to information that Lavrov is outside Putin’s inner circle; Lavrov was surprised by the war; has been crowded out by the likes of Sergei Shoigu (Minister of Defence), Valery Gerasimov (Chief of the General Staff), Alexander Bortnikov (Director of the FSB), Sergey Naryshkin (the spymaster in charge of Russia’s foreign intelligence service) or Nikolai Patrushev (head of Russia’s Security Council). He has not been involved in peace negotiations. “There were rumours for years that he wanted to resign but he was not allowed”, says Soldatov. “There’s also the rumour that in 2016, after the interference in the US election several high level diplomats died unexpectedly, including Vitaly Churkin, and that was taken as a signal that it was probably not a good time to resign. But a popular rumour in Moscow has it that’s why Lavrov started drinking. That he wanted to get out. That he’s not happy.”

“Just think about it”, says Soldatov. “Before 2016 he’d been profiled by the New York Times, and was praised as a very competent and experienced diplomat. Then suddenly he’s a pariah, and his reputation is completely destroyed.” His life’s work was statesmanship. Now he spends his days justifying an attempt to wipe Russia’s nearest neighbour off the map.