If diplomacy is the “patriotic art of lying for one’s country” then few do it better than Sergei Lavrov.
He is the foreign minister who insisted Russia would never invade Ukraine, then, once they had, insisted that they were not. And last month he reduced an audience in Delhi to helpless laughter when he said Ukraine had launched the war against Russia.
And today the Jedi master of the dark arts of Russian diplomacy addresses the UN Security Council as its chair, with Russia holding its presidency for a month. Ukraine has condemned it all as a “bad April Fool’s joke”.
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Lavrov is a diplomatic bruiser who cajoles and bullies where he sees fit but was until the start of this war held, albeit grudgingly, in high regard by many of his Western counterparts.
His aides say, without any apparent irony, that his session will be discussing ways of defending the principles of the UN Charter through which Russia has of course driven a cavalry and entire fleet of carriages with its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Its attack on its neighbour is incompatible with almost every line of the Charter; lines like this one from Article 4: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
But that is not really the point for Mr Lavrov.
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He hopes to use the UN pulpit to push his country’s case for the war and try to win support, or at least acquiescence, from nations still sitting on the fence over it, whether they abstain in UN votes on the conflict or aid and abet efforts to circumvent sanctions.
Mr Lavrov’s diplomats say he will be discussing “the formation of a new multipolar world order based on sovereign equality, equal rights and self-determination”.
Again, a bit rich given what Russia has done to Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s insistence it has no sovereign right to exist.
But it is the multipolar bit that Lavrov hopes may be the most persuasive.
Russia and China bridle against America’s dominance of the post-war world order and say it is time that hegemony was replaced.
They find sympathy among those who say there are rules in that world order for America and allies, and rules for the rest, citing Western intervention in Iraq and Libya as cases in point.
Critics say those pretensions ring hollow. If Russia really wants a more multipolar world the best place to start would be the UN and yet Moscow has acted with wanton disregard for its principles for more than a decade now.
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In the conflict in Syria, it abused its power of veto at the UN to block every effort to rein in its murderous client, the Assad regime, and there is plenty of evidence Russian warplanes bombed both medical facilities and even a UN aid convoy.
The Russians’ invasion of Ukraine and its presidency of the UN Security Council make a grotesque mockery of the United Nations and its mission, but it also gives its diplomats the ideal platform to continue their work prising countries away from the consensus on Ukraine.
The last time Russia held the UN Security Council presidency was in February as its forces invaded Ukraine. Its diplomats were chairing a live session of the council at the exact moment the invasion began.
Then, as now, many used the moment to re-emphasise their calls for the UN to be reformed.
