Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister of 20 years, Sergei Lavrov, knows how to charm. He wouldn’t have risen so quickly through the ranks of the Soviet diplomatic corps and, later, the Russian foreign ministry if he didn’t.
Lavrov’s skills were on full display during his conversation this week with American commentator Tucker Carlson, who seemed quite taken with his interlocutor. That would explain why Carlson didn’t appear keen to challenge Lavrov’s premises in their 80-minute encounter.
That lethargic approach to the journalistic enterprise has its uses. In this case, it allowed us to see just how gullible the Russian foreign minister thinks the rest of us are.
Lavrov evidently understood the biases of his interviewer and the audience Carlson has cultivated in the West. Time and again, he played to them in a superlatively manipulative fashion, largely by ratifying the assumption that rapacious capitalist enterprise fuels Western chauvinism and imperialism. For a one-time Soviet apparatchik, this is bread-and-butter stuff, which is why Lavrov framed Russia’s war of territorial expansionism in Ukraine as an anti-colonial endeavour.
“You know, the right for self-determination is the international legal basis for decolonisation process, which took place in Africa on the basis of this [UN] charter principle,” Lavrov said in reference to the geopolitical fiction Moscow believes in, Novorossiya. “Territorial integrity must be respected only if the governments are legitimate and if they respect the right of their own people,” he added.
Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister of 20 years, Sergei Lavrov, knows how to charm. He wouldn’t have risen so quickly through the ranks of the Soviet diplomatic corps and, later, the Russian foreign ministry if he didn’t.
Lavrov’s skills were on full display during his conversation this week with American commentator Tucker Carlson, who seemed quite taken with his interlocutor. That would explain why Carlson didn’t appear keen to challenge Lavrov’s premises in their 80-minute encounter.
That lethargic approach to the journalistic enterprise has its uses. In this case, it allowed us to see just how gullible the Russian foreign minister thinks the rest of us are.
Lavrov evidently understood the biases of his interviewer and the audience Carlson has cultivated in the West. Time and again, he played to them in a superlatively manipulative fashion, largely by ratifying the assumption that rapacious capitalist enterprise fuels Western chauvinism and imperialism. For a one-time Soviet apparatchik, this is bread-and-butter stuff, which is why Lavrov framed Russia’s war of territorial expansionism in Ukraine as an anti-colonial endeavour.
“You know, the right for self-determination is the international legal basis for decolonisation process, which took place in Africa on the basis of this [UN] charter principle,” Lavrov said in reference to the geopolitical fiction Moscow believes in, Novorossiya. “Territorial integrity must be respected only if the governments are legitimate and if they respect the right of their own people,” he added.