‘This is the world Putin wants to live in’

BBC News Russia tells the story of how Moscow’s diplomacy apparatus deteriorated

Nearly a year and a half after the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, why hasn’t diplomacy managed to stop the bloodshed? Journalists from BBC News Russia sought to answer this question by talking to analysts and former government employees from both Russia and the U.S. What emerged was a story of Russian diplomats increasingly seeking to please Putin as the Russian leader himself became ever more convinced of the power of brute force and the irrelevance of diplomacy. Meduza shares an English-language summary of the report.

In March 2000, Vladimir Putin said that Russia was ready to work with NATO “all the way up to the point of joining the alliance,” explaining that he couldn’t imagine a Russia that was “isolated from Europe.” Analyst Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told BBC News Russia that during Putin’s first two terms as president, Russia’s diplomats made some impressive achievements. At the same time, however, others had begun joining the diplomatic corps who lacked “creativity and critical thinking,” a source who worked in the Kremlin in the 2000s told journalists.

In 2004, Putin administration employees recommended Sergey Lavrov to the president for the office of Foreign Minister. According to the former official who spoke to the BBC, Lavrov “understood both the U.S. and Europe.” In the years since, however, the minister has “transformed,” said the source: “That was a different Lavrov.” Boris Bondarev, a former advisor to Russia’s Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva who resigned after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave a similar account. Lavrov, according to Bondarev, changed along with Putin, and this was inevitable, since there’s no country on Earth whose top diplomat can disagree with the president and expect to stay in his post.

The BBC recounted how in 2009, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Sergey Lavrov a symbolic “Reset” button for Russian-American relations. The two countries also established the Civil Society Working Group, a forum designed to help foster civil society in Russia, led by future U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and Putin’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov.

According to former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, the White House understood perfectly well that while Putin might be leaving the presidency, he was still the person determining the country’s future. During a 2009 meeting with Obama, Putin laid out his vision of the world to the American president and accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of betraying Russia, according to the BBC. “He complained that he had extended his hand to the U.S. after September 11. And all he had received in response was the U.S.’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the war in Iraq, and NATO expansion,” said Rhodes. He added that U.S. officials left the meetings between Obama and then-President Dmitry Medvedev feeling confident that Russia’s diplomats were obeying not the president but Putin, who was the country’s prime minister at the time.

For Washington, the situation was clear: there would be no “reset.” Rhodes called Lavrov “a person who just goes with the flow”: “When things were headed in the direction of a ‘reset,’ he went in that direction, and when the wind shifted, so did his behavior.” At the same time, a former Kremlin official told the BBC that Putin initially didn’t approve of that behavior: he didn’t like when diplomats were “constantly seeking his approval.” But by the 2010s, according to the source, it had stopped bothering the Russian leader that his diplomats were “at his beck and call.”

According to McFaul and Rhodes, the attempt to improve relations between the two countries failed for three reasons: the Arab Spring, the U.S. intervention in Libya (which left Putin convinced that Washington sought to overthrow other regimes), and the protests in Russia in 2011–2012, to which the U.S. authorities reacted approvingly. The BBC’s sources noted that when Putin returned to the Kremlin, the language Moscow used to talk about foreign policy changed noticeably. The article includes several examples of quotes from Russian ambassadors and Foreign Ministry employees from recent years:

• “Look at me! Don’t look away! What are you looking away for?” (Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov, speaking to UK Permanent Representative Matthew Rycroft)
• “Sorry for the language, but we don’t give a shit about Western sanctions.” (Russian Ambassador to Sweden Viktor Tatarintsev)
• “Ask the peacocks.” (Sergey Lavrov to a journalist asking permission to ask a question)
• “Fucking morons.” (Sergey Lavrov)
• “Let me know. Otherwise, you’re about to hear what Russian Grad missiles really sound like.” (Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova)

Boris Bondarev referred to Maria Zakharova’s appointment as the Russian Defense Ministry’s official spokesperson as a “demand of the times.” Her predecessors, he said, were “real diplomat diplomats who mumbled their statements in refined expressions.” Nobody expected their replacement to be so “lively,” he told the BBC, but numerous other diplomats have since adopted the same style.

According to the BBC, the “last straw” for relations between Russia and the West was the start of the Donbas conflict in 2014. Russia’s Foreign Ministry, the outlet noted, continued to communicate with its American counterparts on certain security issues, but everyone in the West understood that diplomats had no means of influencing the events in Ukraine, because Putin was making all of the decisions himself. According to political scientist Alexander Gabuev, as years went by, Putin’s conviction that he “already knows everything,” and therefore doesn’t need diplomats, grew stronger. The Financial Times wrote that Sergey Lavrov was the first civilian official to learn about Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and that he was told about it on the night of February 24, 2022, just hours before the full-scale invasion began.

In January 2022, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov and Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin met in Geneva with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and U.S. Under Secretary of State Bonnie Jenkins to discuss Russia’s security proposals. “It was a nightmare. The Americans were like, ‘Let’s negotiate.’ Ryabkov was screaming, ‘We need Ukraine! We’re not going anywhere without Ukraine! Take your things and get back [to NATO’s 1997 borders]!’ Sherman is an iron woman, but I think her jaw probably dropped when she heard that,” Bondarev said.

The BBC’s sources said it’s unlikely that diplomacy will be able to help stop the war now that it’s been going on for a year and a half. According to them, the contradictions between the positions of Russia, Ukraine, and the West are too great, and there are no grounds for behind-the-scenes negotiations. Bondarev noted that most of the work diplomats do occurs out of public view, but after the full-scale war began, even these closed-room communications declined sharply; there was simply “not much to talk about.”

Analyst Samuel Charap said the two sides will have to communicate sooner or later, since the only alternative is Russian or Ukrainian victory on the battlefield, which neither country currently seems capable of achieving. Additionally, a long-term war would increase the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO and, as a result, the risk that one or both sides use nuclear weapons. At the same time, Charap called Putin “such a toxic player” that it’s unclear whether anybody will talk to him and whether he’ll want to participate in any settlement himself. Ben Rhodes noted that Putin still understands the benefits of communication channels, but he doesn’t use his diplomats for this purpose: “Now it’s intelligence agents talking to intelligence agents, military officers talking to military officers.” In his opinion, this is the “world Putin wants to live in.”

The former Kremlin official also noted that despite these conditions, most diplomats are choosing to stay in their chosen career because after 10 or 20 years in the Foreign Ministry, “all of your life skills have atrophied.” He also said that he saw Sergey Lavrov several months ago: “A weary person. A little obstinate. War is not his thing, and there’s not really anywhere for him to go. He’s been in his position for too long. And where’s there for him to go, other than on a pension? Nowhere, really. So he stays there, guarding his seat.” In the opinion of Ben Rhodes, the agency’s employees lack the courage to do anything, calling them to “​​apparatchiks of Putinism.”

Correction. This article originally attributed the words about “apparatchiks of Putinism” to former Foreign Ministry official Boris Bondarev. This is not the case. We apologize for the mistake.

Original story by Sergey Goryashko, Elizaveta Fokht, and Sofia Samokhina for BBC News Russia