**Did President Trump Just Collect His First Scalp in the Kremlin?**
Whispers are growing in Moscow that President Vladimir Putin is souring on his longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The trigger for this apparent cooling of a storied friendship at the apex of Moscow’s officialdom seems to be the White House’s decision on October 22 to cancel a summit aimed at ending the Ukraine war.
“I didn’t want to do that meeting because I didn’t think anything was going to be happening of significance,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday.
Last month, he announced the summit’s cancellation shortly after a “tense” phone call between Mr. Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Following that call, Mr. Rubio reportedly “told Trump that Moscow was showing no willingness to negotiate,” according to the Financial Times.
A Russian Telegram channel with 400,000 followers, Nezyger, citing an unidentified source, adds: “Lavrov was unprepared for the dialogue with Rubio and conducted it in an extremely tense manner, refusing to engage in a discussion with the Secretary of State.”
At 75, and after 21 years as Russia’s foreign minister and a decade as ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Lavrov has reportedly asked to retire several times before. The difference now seems to be that Mr. Putin appears eager to reshuffle his foreign ministry, even as official Kremlin spokespeople push back against such speculation.
“There is nothing true in these reports,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. He added that Mr. Lavrov “is certainly continuing to serve as foreign minister.”
However, it’s worth remembering that Mr. Peskov denied any plans to invade Ukraine just two days before Russia launched its full-scale attack.
Further fuelling speculation about Mr. Lavrov’s fate is his notable absence from events where he used to be front and center. On Tuesday, Kremlinologists observed that he conspicuously skipped a crucial meeting of Mr. Putin’s security council. Instead, a lower-ranked official was sent to lead a delegation to the upcoming G-20 summit.
Mr. Lavrov was also uncharacteristically absent from last week’s ASEAN summit in Malaysia, which Mr. Trump attended.
According to Russian press accounts, Mr. Lavrov lost favor after the phone call with Mr. Rubio. The reports claim that the sharp-tongued but typically cautious Russian diplomat lost his cool during the exchange.
Conversely, it could be argued that he was following Mr. Putin’s instructions to show toughness — a stance that may have raised Mr. Trump’s ire.
Regardless of the cause, if Mr. Putin is ready to throw his longtime friend under the bus, he seems to be sparing him the severe punishments suffered by some regime foes.
In fact, regime loyalists are now closing ranks behind the veteran diplomat.
“The rumors that Lavrov was rude to Rubio, showed unwillingness to negotiate, or caused the summit to be canceled are complete nonsense,” former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev told the Moscow Times.
Such comments suggest that, even if there is a major chill blowing from the Kremlin’s top echelon, Mr. Lavrov is not on his way to a Siberian labor camp just yet.
Years ago, Mr. Lavrov told journalist Benny Avni that for a few weeks each summer, he goes with high school friends to a dacha in Siberia, where they spend days whitewater rafting.
Another Russian diplomat countered that the old buddies, instead, spend the time consuming alcohol inside the dacha.
Regardless of how he spends his downtime, if Russia’s most impressive diplomat soon retires to a favored Siberian dacha, Moscow will lose one of its most formidable tribunes.
https://www.nysun.com/article/is-russias-foreign-minister-out
