6 November 2025
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appears to have fallen out of favor with the Kremlin after a disastrous call with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which led to the disruption of the summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Lavrov, 76, who has headed the Foreign Ministry for over 20 years, failed to appear at the landmark meeting of the Russian Security Council, which Putin chaired on November 5.
At a meeting with permanent members of the Security Council, which includes Lavrov, Putin instructed them to consider proposals for resuming nuclear testing, which Russia last conducted in 1990. Lavrov “was deliberately absent” from the meeting, a source told Kommersant . Lavrov was the only permanent member of the Security Council to miss the landmark meeting.
Lavrov also lost his status as head of the Russian delegation to the G20 summit. This year, it will be headed by Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration Maxim Oreshkin, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov announced on Thursday. According to him, the decision to appoint Oreshkin was made by Putin.
The president himself once again decided not to attend the G20 summit, which will be held this year in South Africa, a signatory to the Rome Statute and obligated to arrest Putin on an International Criminal Court warrant.
In 2025, due to an ICC warrant, Putin was unable to fly to Brazil for the BRICS summit. And in 2022, he skipped the G20 summit in Bali. In both cases, Lavrov was the head of the Russian delegation.
A veteran of Russian diplomacy and former Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council, Lavrov held a telephone conversation with Rubio on October 21, during which he was supposed to discuss the terms of the upcoming Putin-Trump summit in Budapest. However, Rubio recommended that Trump cancel the meeting, and the summit’s disruption was followed by US sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil—the first since Trump’s return to the White House.
Reuters sources familiar with the situation said the reason was the Kremlin’s intransigent stance, which “wanted too much” and rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine.
After the failed conversation with Rubio, Lavrov himself again spoke of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv and demanded that the “root causes of the conflict” be addressed. An immediate ceasefire would result in most of Ukraine “remaining under the control of a Nazi regime,” and the West would once again “pump” the Ukrainian Armed Forces with weapons for “terrorist actions in the form of strikes against Russia’s civilian infrastructure,” Lavrov claimed.
The horse should be more careful. He lives in a crime syndicate, after all. No, he won’t fall from a window or drink spiced tea … he might end up as a jar of glue.
Glue? Naaaa, canned horse meat, yummy, MREs for the front!
😄