Rumours of a fallout between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are doing the rounds in the Kremlin, after the latter’s name was omitted from Moscow’s delegation at an upcoming summit of the Group of 20 in South Africa.
An order signed by Putin on Tuesday appointed the deputy head of the country’s presidential administration, Maxim Oreshkin, to lead Moscow’s delegation at an upcoming summit of the Group of 20 in South Africa on Nov. 22-23. The delegation will also include Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Pankin, Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov, and Russia's G20 Sherpa Svetlana Lukash.
While the absence of Lavrov at an event attended by US President Donald Trump was deemed conspicuous, the minister also failed to appear at a Russian-Kazakh meeting between Putin and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, which took place in the Kremlin. This triggered speculations that all is not well between Putin and Lavrov, with some Ukrainian media citing that it has something to do with the collapse of the Budapest summit.
A Financial Times report too had cited that the US cancelled its summit with Russia in Hungary following Lavrov's conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on October 20.
Russian journalist Farida Rustamova drew attention to this on her Telegram channel. According to her, Lavrov had never previously missed negotiations of this level. "Lavrov's absence from today's talks between the two presidents seems very strange," Rustamova wrote.
She clarified that all key members of the Russian government, except the Foreign Minister, were present at the meeting. However, the Foreign Ministry did not report any other events involving Lavrov. "Perhaps it's due to health issues. But they didn't prevent Lavrov from giving a press conference yesterday—albeit via video link, only for state media," the journalist added.
There were also reports that Lavrov has fallen out of favor after the collapse of negotiations with the United States, for the first time in decades. He has been suspended from key meetings and delegations as a “public demonstration of his political decline.”
However, former KGB and Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer Sergei Zhirnov told Channel 24 that Lavrov has not been dismissed. “And there is no conflict between him and Putin. He added that Putin didn’t want to go to Budapest, and the decision has nothing to do with Lavrov.
“Putin was afraid to go there. We've spoken more than once about his paranoia and fear of flying to NATO countries. He was afraid to fly to Erdogan. And Lavrov is Putin's loyal soldier, who doesn't have an independent position,” Zhirnov noted.
Zhirnov added that Putin doesn't punish his allies. “On October 5, 2022, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Crimean Security Council, held a meeting in Crimea on the security of the occupied peninsula and southern Russia. Three days later, an explosion occurred on the Crimean Bridge. But the dictator punished no one,” he said.
