Sergei Lavrov has become the symbol of Putin’s uniquely mendacious brand of diplomacy

Sergei Lavrov’s style of diplomacy resembles something out of a Lewis Carroll story  Credit: Getty

David Blair Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator

02 May 2025

It was when Sergei Lavrov and his aides raised their eyes heavenwards and performed the sign of the cross in unison that I realised how almost anything was possible during a meeting with Russia’s minister of foreign affairs.

Instinctively, I glanced under the table, just in case the floor beneath the seats of the British delegation was slowly opening to reveal a tank full of sharks.

We were visiting the Russian mission at UN Headquarters in New York, and Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, had just mentioned Alexander Litvinenko, the former spy who was horribly murdered with polonium poison by Russian agents in London.

https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/778426233302446080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E778426233302446080%7Ctwgr%5E09af12dec081489c54a4cf3e9f4001941478d8a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2025%2F05%2F02%2Fwhat-its-really-like-to-negotiate-with-sergei-lavrov%2F

David Blair, pictured top right, in meeting with Lavrov at the UN Headquarters in New York)

The mere sound of that name was enough to cause Lavrov and his otherwise expressionless officials to suddenly implore the Almighty’s deliverance from evil.

But no one should mistake Lavrov’s displays of piety for the tolling bell of conscience. During his 21 years as Russian foreign minister – and over 50 as a Soviet or Russian diplomat – he has gone beyond mere duplicity and dishonesty to become the world’s leading practitioner of post-modern diplomacy, reducing statecraft to a permanent struggle against the whole idea of objective truth.

As they seek to end Ukraine’s war, Donald Trump’s envoys will now go head-to-head with Lavrov. His latest contribution to what the Americans optimistically call the “peace process” was an interview this week in which he blithely restated all of Russia’s maximum demands, including full recognition of five annexed territories – heedless of the reality that Russia has never captured large areas of four of them – along with “de-miltarising and de-Nazifying” Ukraine.

Nobody who has encountered Lavrov, 75, would be surprised. I worked at the Foreign Office and Downing Street for nearly eight years, and I first came across him in the relatively benign era when he was still meeting British foreign secretaries.

Even then, I found a macabre fascination in being opposite a man so stubbornly malevolent, with hooded eyes glowering through rimless glasses.

The Russian mind-games would sometimes begin even before we had entered the room. As we walked down the corridor for the “sign of the cross” meeting at the UN General Assembly in 2017, a Russian official carefully informed us that Minister Lavrov had squeezed in the United Kingdom somewhere between Equatorial Guinea and Uganda, showing his view of our place in the international league table.

Once in the windowless room, we found ourselves placed under the flinty gaze of Vladimir Putin, whose portrait adorned the opposite wall. Across the table, Lavrov’s slab-faced aides made a point of ignoring their British counterparts; one ostentatiously played with his phone.

The two ministers began by discussing their respective programmes at the General Assembly, an opening gambit that would have been wholly innocent with anyone except Lavrov, who instantly started a game of one-upmanship.

Johnson remarked that he was hoping to see Rex Tillerson, then US secretary of state. Lavrov answered that he had already seen “Rex” in “Trump Tower”.

Johnson said that his prime minister, Theresa May, was about to deliver Britain’s speech to the General Assembly. Lavrov responded that he had delivered Russia’s speech himself.

Johnson said that he was going to a Commonwealth reception. “We have a Commonwealth!” replied Lavrov. “It’s the Commonwealth of Independent States,” a reference to a largely defunct association of former members of the Soviet Empire.

“But”, added Lavrov with heavy emphasis, “you do not respect the independence of your Commonwealth.” An answer swam into my mind: we don’t invade them either.

And that was just the small talk. Off we went on a rollercoaster ride, a slalom of absurdity, in which Lavrov seemed determined to vindicate German historian Hannah Arendt’s line that totalitarian propaganda was designed to show that “everything was possible and nothing was true”.

Having crossed himself at the mention of Litvinenko, Lavrov flatly denied any Russian responsibility for his murder.

When Johnson pointed out that two Russian agents had left a trail of lethal polonium across London, Lavrov replied that the “trail was in so many places” that “someone else must have left it,” as if our capital was routinely packed with people carrying the rare and highly irradiated substance.

Above all, he was incredulous that Litvinenko’s fate was still a problem for bilateral relations. “The Jews killed Jesus Christ. Does that mean you won’t cooperate with the state of Israel for ever more?” he asked. Aside from being faintly anti-Semitic, this analogy only made sense if Russia really had murdered Litvinenko, contrary to his earlier denial.

I was reminded of an earlier meeting with Lavrov, in the same room the previous year. Russia’s client dictator in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, had just bombed an aid convoy outside Aleppo.

Challenged on this incident, Lavrov said that Assad was innocent because no Syrian planes had been in the area at the time. Then he declared that Assad always tried to avoid hitting humanitarian targets. When reminded that someone must have bombed the convoy, Lavrov replied, in effect, that Syria’s despotwas fighting Islamists and this sometimes required tough measures.

I noted how he deployed every stage of the classic argument of the shameless defence lawyer: “My client wasn’t there; but if he was there, he didn’t do it; and if he did do it, it was self-defence”.

In other settings, Lavrov employed more venerable techniques of Russian diplomacy. He was capable of making an issue of just about anything, not always to extract a concession but to achieve psychological advantage.

In the Consultation Room near the Security Council, I watched Lavrov accost John Kerry, then US secretary of state, as they were both about to leave UN headquarters for a meeting on Syria. Lavrov was vehemently objecting to the session being held in a nearby hotel. “Why not here?” he demanded.

“Sergei, the arrangements have been made, the cars are waiting,” replied Kerry imploringly.

“No John, let’s do it here.”

“Sergei, we don’t have a room here, and the cars are about to leave.”

Lavrov conceded with an expletive: the point was made, he did not need this meeting, he would attend on sufferance and the Americans were wasting his time.

Lavrov’s mastery of English includes the full range of Anglo-Saxon epithets, which decorate his sentences. As well as swearing at Kerry within earshot of me, Lavrov once told David Miliband, the foreign secretary under Gordon Brown, to stop “f – – – ing lecturing me”.

At the meeting on Syria, the main subject was that Russia had agreed on a document specifying seven days of calm, but their friend Assad had spent the week bombing civilians anyway. Lavrov responded first by stonewalling and then blaming Assad’s enemies for getting themselves bombed:

Kerry: “What about the seven days of calm. We won’t back off from that demand.”

Lavrov: “We confirm that – it’s part of the document. You have seven days.”

Kerry: “We haven’t had seven days of calm.”

Lavrov: “You’re reopening the document.”

Kerry: “The document got reopened by days of fighting in Syria. The document got blown apart – literally.”

Lavrov: “The regime pulled back, but the opposition continued fighting.”

The meeting ended with Lavrov announcing that he would be returning to Moscow, and that was that. Meanwhile, in Syria, the killing went on – partly thanks to his handiwork.

By this stage, Lavrov was the grand master of covering up Assad’s atrocities. When the dictator used poison gas in Damascus in 2013,Lavrov pioneered the technique that Russia would employ time and again: bury the truth beneath an avalanche of lies.

His ministry pumped out one ludicrous exculpatory theory after another: the video footage was faked and the chemical attack never happened; something had happened, but it was staged; it wasn’t staged and people had been killed, but Syria’s rebels had deliberately gassed themselves as a “provocation”.

When a UN investigation found that Assad was responsible, Lavrov managed to shut down the group that conducted the inquiry. When the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reached the same conclusion about Assad’s later chemical attacks, Lavrov led a sustained campaign to destroy this body by denying it a budget. And all the while, he waged his onslaught against the concept of reality with a blizzard of conspiracy theories.

From my desk in the Foreign Secretary’s Private Office in 2018, I watched Lavrov create a new blizzard after Russia tried to kill Sergei Skripal, a former spy, with Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. First, Lavrov denied that anything had happened, then his ministry claimed that Novichok had never existed, then it had existed but all stocks had been destroyed. Finally, they settled on the claim that the British had done this to their own city in order to distract attention from Brexit.

I marvelled at Britain’s special place in his pantheon of infamy. Whenever Lavrov lost a vote at the UN or failed to shut down an investigation for finding Syria’s regime guilty of using chemical weapons, he would blame his defeat on an “Anglo-Saxon nexus”.

One day in the Private Office, a document landed on my desk with a covering note from Lavrov, purporting to be a “dossier” on British interference in Russia. This informed me that the British had murdered Rasputin in 1916, masterminded the Bolshevik revolution and then dedicated themselves to overthrowing the Bolsheviks – apparently suffering from buyer’s remorse – while also trying to colonise the Caucasus.

Lavrov’s dossier was studded with glittering characters, one of whom I recognised from childhood daytime television. In 1983, ITV made a series called Reilly, Ace of Spies about a man called Sidney Reilly, played by the New Zealand actor Sam Neill. And there was Reilly in Lavrov’s dossier, accused of various misdeeds. In fact, some of Lavrov’s information seemed to derive straight from the TV series.

All of the above was just a foretaste of what was to come after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By then, I was in Downing Street and I viewed Lavrov’s inevitable outbursts with grim amusement.

It was wryly predictable that – of course – he would claim that Russia was the country that had been invaded. Lavrov duly described the conflict as the “war which we are trying to stop and which was launched against us”.

After he denounced Ukraine’s elected leaders as “Nazis”, one interviewer pointed out that Volodymyr Zelensky was Jewish. “Hitler also had Jewish origins,” replied Lavrov. “The biggest anti-Semites were Jewish.”

When Russia’s invasion went off the rails and Ukraine’s forces drove Putin’s tanks back from Kyiv, Lavrov said: “As a sign of goodwill, the Ukrainians asked us to withdraw troops from Kyiv, which we did.” Perhaps Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 was also a goodwill gesture?

As I watched Lavrov in action, I would find myself wondering: how does he live like that? How does he safely cross the road? Does he at least admit that red means “stop” and green means “go”?

Foreign Office colleagues would tell me of an earlier Lavrov, who served as Russia’s ambassador to the UN, and was capable of the occasional lapse into total honesty. When ties were warmer, William Hague, as foreign secretary, would take Lavrov whisky-tasting at Berry Bros and Rudd on Pall Mall.

Lavrov in his own words

On the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London [September 2017]

“The Jews killed Jesus Christ. Does that mean you won’t cooperate with the state of Israel for ever more?”

On a chemical weapon attack by Assad’s regime in Syria [April 2018]

“The special services of a country, which is now seeking to be in the first ranks of the Russophobic campaign, were involved in this staged event.”

Statement shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine [March 2022]

“Russia has no plans to attack other countries: we have not even attacked Ukraine.”

On Zelensky being a Nazi despite being Jewish [May 2022]

“Hitler also had Jewish origins.”

On claim that Hitler had Jewish blood [May 2022]

“Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.”

On the Russian invasion of Ukraine, [March 2023]

“The war which we are trying to stop and which was launched against us.”

On the Russian defeat outside Kyiv [January 2024]

“As a sign of goodwill, the Ukrainians asked us to withdraw troops from Kyiv, which we did.”

My conclusion about today’s Lavrov is that no one should consider him simply as a liar, though, of course, he is.

Instead, the key to understanding him is to grasp how his use of diplomacy as one gigantic assault on objective truth grants him the privilege of behaving like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, empowered to construct entire worlds of fantasy, as if words mean just what he chooses them to mean, neither more nor less.

Raise any international situation and, like a programmable mendacity machine, Lavrov will instantly invert reality and present you with a topsy-turvy vision in which the invading country was actually attacked, the rebels gassed themselves, Hitler was Jewish, and everyone in London trails polonium everywhere.

How should the US Administration deal with such a man? How do you handle the tradition of Russian diplomacy that he exemplifies?

The Americans should remember that the only antidote to Lavrov’s Lewis Carroll diplomacy is overwhelming power, so great that he might one day be forced to watch his master sign on a dotted line and then keep the deal. Only by metaphorically knocking Lavrov and Putin to the ground might you compel them finally to make their peace, not just with Ukraine, but with objective reality.