As Moscow and Washington prepare for talks on the latest version of Donald Trump’s peace plan next week, leaked recordings of a conversation with US envoy Steve Witkoff have thrown a spotlight on to senior diplomat Yuri Ushakov. It seems he, not Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is the prime mover behind Russia’s negotiating position.
The stature of Lavrov, once a legend in the diplomatic community, has steadily diminished since 2014, when he wasn’t even consulted before Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. Every year since then, the now-75-year-old minister has petitioned Putin to be allowed to retire; every year this is denied. Instead, Lavrov remains confined to a role of repeating threadbare talking points to audiences who frequently and openly disbelieve him. Even the crucial security cooperation relationships with China, North Korea, India and Iran are handled these days by Sergei Shoigu, the former defence minister and now secretary of Russia’s security council, who is already sometimes being called ‘Russia’s other foreign minister’.
While he may lack Lavrov’s abrasive charisma, Ushakov has proven to be a survivor
This puts into context the overheated tales that Lavrov, who disappeared from public view for a fortnight, was being punished after a proposed Putin-Trump summit in Budapest was called off last month. Allegedly this was because Lavrov was too inflexible when talking to his US counterpart, Marco Rubio.
Yet, Lavrov doesn’t freelance these days. The steadily-grumpier minister simply speaks the lines he is given and, tellingly, he is now back in circulation. When asked about the claims during a state visit to Kyrgyzstan, President Putin denied his minister had fallen into disgrace: ‘He reported to me, told me what he would be doing and when. That’s exactly what he’s doing.’ Most likely, Lavrov was simply ill. With power increasingly in the hands of septuagenarians, the Kremlin seems to try to suppress news of any incapacities, presumably to avoid drawing attention to the potential fate of the 73-year-old President (who, despite lurid rumours to the contrary, appears still in good health).
In any case, Lavrov’s position is arguably irrelevant and certainly had no effect on Russia’s negotiating position. This reflects Ushakov’s growing centrality in both the process and helping shape Putin’s own ideas, with once-influential figures such as Lavrov and former security council secretary (and hawk’s hawk) Nikolai Patrushev becoming marginalised. The 78-year-old Ushakov is another foreign ministry veteran: after a year as deputy foreign minister under Boris Yeltsin in the late Nineties, he then spent almost a decade as ambassador to Washington, before becoming deputy head of the presidential administration and then presidential aide for foreign policy in 2012. The position of presidential aide in the Russian system is an ambiguous one. It can be little more than an honorific sinecure but, if Putin chooses, it can also be one of his right-hand and hatchet men. Ushakov is decidedly of the latter kind.
He has for a long time been something of a fixture of high-level meetings between Putin and US presidents, a silent figure in the background, sometimes meeting the media afterwards to give the Kremlin’s spin. Yet, while he may lack Lavrov’s abrasive charisma, Ushakov has proven not only to be a survivor – his own trajectory from advocate of the US-Russia détente to hawk has both mirrored and influenced Putin’s.
As ambassador, he was keen to promote Russo-American business ties, and this persists in warped form in his support for Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, in trying to seduce a commercially-minded White House with dreams of lucrative deals. After returning to Moscow, though, Ushakov became increasingly more sceptical about the US and, especially, European intentions. Between 1986 and 1992, he was minister-counsellor at the Soviet and then Russian embassy to Denmark. A diplomatic colleague from then, who has kept in occasional touch with him since, noted: ‘He didn’t just change to reflect Putin’s views, he genuinely came to feel – especially after the Revolution of Dignity [in Ukraine] – that the West had turned against Russia.’
Ushakov hardly needed coaching from Witkoff on how Trump should be handled, being an experienced America hand. Then again, letting Witkoff feel he could school the wily Russian may have been intended to woo the amateur diplomat. Such double-think is a key part of Ushakov’s playbook: his approach tends to be less overtly confrontational than Lavrov’s, but no less ruthless.
For all that, Ushakov is a pragmatist. While there are some in Putin’s circle taking a more ideological (or downright greedy) position, urging the President to string the Americans on while imposing Russia’s terms on Ukraine by force, Ushakov appears to be advocating for the exploration of a deal that could allow Russia to declare a triumph. As a British diplomat put it: ‘Ushakov doesn’t seem committed to a deal at any price, but nor is he totally opposed to one. To be honest, that is about the best we can hope for in the current situation.’
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