Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov who born 21 March 1950 is a Russian diplomat who has served as the foreign minister of Russia since 2004. He is the longest-serving Russian foreign minister since Andrei Gromyko during the Soviet Union.
Lavrov was born in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in 1972. He received his first Soviet diplomatic posting in Sri Lanka, and speaks fluent Sinhala, Dhivehi, English, and French, in addition to his native Russian.
From 1981 to 1988 Lavrov held several posts in the Soviet Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Starting in the late 1980s he was deputy director and then director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of International Organizations before becoming a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1992. He later served as the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations from 1994 to 2004.
Sergey Lavrov Become Foreign Minister
On 9 March 2004, President Vladimir Putin appointed Lavrov to the post of minister of foreign affairs. He succeeded Igor Ivanov in the post.
Lavrov held on to his position through Vladimir Putin’s Second Cabinet while Dmitri Medvedev occupied the presidency from 2008 to 2012. On 21 May 2012, Lavrov was reappointed foreign minister to the cabinet led by prime minister Dimitri Medvedev.
Lavrov is regarded as continuing in the style of his predecessor: a brilliant diplomat but a civil servant rather than a politician. A Russian foreign policy expert at London’s Chatham House has described him as “a tough, reliable, extremely sophisticated negotiator” but adds that “he’s not part of Putin’s inner sanctum” and that the toughening of Russian foreign policy has got very little to do with him.
US politicians have been much more critical in their appraisal of Lavrov, seeing him as emblematic of President Putin’s resurgent violent foreign policies. Then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found that Lavrov treated her poorly during negotiations, like a “jerk.”
Several Obama administration officials interviewed for a profile on Lavrov described him as an “anti-diplomat” with “nothing redeemable” about his “uncharismatic, offensive, uncompromising, cruel, unlikeable, brusque, caddish” character.
On 15 January 2020, he resigned as part of the cabinet, after President Vladimir Putin delivered the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he proposed several amendments to the constitution. On 21 January 2020, he maintained his position in Mikhail Mishustin’s Cabinet.