That Moscow’s foreign minister has outlasted seven US secretaries of state is testament to his usefulness to Vladimir Putin
soon after stepping off the plane in Bali it would have been understandable for a man who has been cast by his leader as his stand-in punchbag at the summit.deputed Lavrov to attend the two-day event in his stead, and for a brief moment it appeared to have been too much.
Oddly, if Lavrov has succumbed to ill-health, it would have been a moment of genuine regret for some western diplomats, who over two decades have become inured to this fixture of Russian diplomacy. Born in 1950 towards the end of the Stalin era to diplomatic parents, he was educated at the elite Russian Institute of International Relations before ascending to become Russia’s envoy at the UN, where for a decade he lived through the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, the then US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said Lavrov seemed a man unmoored by the fate of his country.
But he also knows when to stop the verbal onslaughts. He once ended talks with the then US secretary of state, John Kerry, with a post-midnight dinner at the foreign ministry’s guesthouse and a toast to the American B-50B bomber that made the world’s first nonstop flight around the world in 1949 – with a wine of that year’s vintage.
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