Has Russia’s foreign minister become a fall guy?
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You might call it the new Kremlinology. During the decades of the Cold War, keeping track of who was in political favor, and who had fallen from grace, in the Kremlin’s corridors of power became a professional vocation within the Washington Beltway. Intelligence analysts and Sovietologists alike pored over pictures of Communist Party meetings and official gatherings to identify who was sitting next to whom, who was conspicuously absent, and how those positions had in an effort to predict what could come next in the Soviet Union’s mercurial power politics.
With the USSR’s collapse, Kremlinology became largely passe, as fewer and fewer experts focused in earnest on the ins-and-outs of palace intrigue in Moscow. But now the practice is back with a vengeance. Since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hirings, firings, reshuffles and demotions have been scrutinized in minute detail as policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals try to get a sense of where Moscow’s military misadventure might be headed.
The latest subject of this speculation is Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. A regime stalwart who has long carried Putin’s water (and boosted his neo-imperial agenda), Lavrov has been conspicuously absent in recent days from a number of high-profile functions. The Foreign Minister, usually a fixture, failed to attend a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council on November 5th – purportedly “by agreement” (presumably with Putin). He was also cut out of Russia’s delegation to the upcoming G20 meeting in South Africa later this month, with a much more junior official, Deputy Chief of Staff Maxim Oreshkin, tapped to lead the Russian team instead.
To hear Russian officials tell it, of course, things are still very much business as usual. “There is no truth to these reports whatsoever,” the Kremlin’s long-suffering spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, has reassured reporters. “Lavrov continues to serve as foreign minister, of course.”
Indeed, he still seems to, for the moment. But what is becoming painfully apparent is that Lavrov has badly fumbled his government’s dealings with the Trump administration in the aftermath of the August Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, culminating in the cancellation of last month’s planned meeting between the two leaders in Budapest, Hungary. That represents a big problem for Putin, whose war strategy depends on keeping the United States on the sidelines of the nearly-four-year-old conflict.
Kremlin insiders understand very well that if the Trump administration grows impatient enough with Russia’s intransigence to throw its weight fully behind European efforts to defend Ukraine, the results could be catastrophic for Moscow. We then might see a surge of additional American military aid to Kyiv, supplementing the military equipment now being provided by countries like France, Germany and Poland. (Indeed, as the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General has detailed, as of June there were nearly $60 billion-worth of funds appropriated by Congress for Ukraine that have yet to be disbursed.) We could also see something that has been conspicuously absent to date – a serious national effort to rebuild the American “arsenal of democracy” to defend vulnerable allies, including Eastern European states that are now scrambling to better protect themselves from potential future aggression from Russia.
Stopping these things from becoming a reality surely ranks as the most important priority for Russia’s top diplomat. Yet, as Washington’s position toward Moscow continues to harden, it is becoming painfully obvious that Lavrov simply isn’t getting the job done. Of course, the fundamental problem is that, no matter how talented of a diplomat he happens to be, Russia’s Foreign Minister is being asked to defend the indefensible. Sooner or later, he’s liable to end up as a scapegoat because of it.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2025/11/10/why-russias-foreign-minister-may-have-a-murky-future/
