When Vladimir Putin sent his government list to parliament in May 2024, Sergei Lavrov kept his job. The surprise that week was elsewhere: Putin dismissed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu instead. DPA noted that Lavrov, then 74, had held the foreign ministry since 2004 and described him as a close ally of the president and an essential hand in Russia’s diplomacy during the Ukraine war.
That staying power is the story. The shift is how little the man has changed on the surface while the job around him has been rewritten.
From Sri Lanka to the UN
Lavrov is a product of the Soviet diplomatic machine. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and served as a Soviet diplomat in Sri Lanka before moving to the United Nations in the 1990s. He represented Russia there from 1994 to 2004, a full decade, according to Newsweek. Newsweek also stressed what sets him apart from much of the Kremlin circle: he was “not recruited by Putin from either the security services or the St Petersburg regional government.” His career in Moscow’s foreign policy institutions, the magazine wrote, dates back to 1972.
Euronews, in a factbox published on November 15, 2022, called him “a technocrat and effective orator.”
A harder line
He was not always the hawk. In 2009 he joined then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an effort to improve relations between Moscow and Washington. Euronews wrote that he has nonetheless presided over “a steady cooling of relations with the West since Putin came to power in 2000,” and that in the last decade he adopted “an increasingly hawkish position,” backing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and attacking what the Kremlin calls Western efforts to constrain Russia.
The G20 summit in Bali, held in November 2022, showed the new routine. Lavrov, 72 at the time, led the Russian delegation there in place of Putin.
Why he lasts
Euronews and Newsweek both give him the same label: the longest-serving foreign minister of post-Soviet Russia. DPA put it a little more cautiously, calling him one of the longest-serving foreign ministers in the world. DPA added that speculation about his future had followed him into 2024, after two decades in the post.
Sources
- Sergey Lavrov: Russia's Foreign Minister (Euronews G20 factbox)
- Russia's Top Diplomat: Who Is Sergey Lavrov? (Newsweek)
- Lavrov remains Russian foreign minister after 20 years in office (DPA via Yahoo News)
