Note: This profile originally appeared in Foreign police ‘s UN Brief, the contextual newsletter covering the United Nations General Assembly this week. Subscribe to her and other newsletters here.

At the end of 2003, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to introduce a smoking ban at New York headquarters. Most chain-smoking diplomats rolled their eyes and complained about the move, but a senior diplomat fired back.

Sergey Lavrov, then Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Annan and proudly displayed the ban, continuing to light up in the headquarters building. “The UN building belongs to all member countries while the secretary general is just a hired manager,” he said at the time. According to seasoned diplomats, the move was from the Lavrov era, and foreshadowed the brutal and acerbic approach to diplomacy he would later master as Russia’s top diplomat.

Note: This profile originally appeared in Foreign police ‘s UN Brief, the contextual newsletter covering the United Nations General Assembly this week. Subscribe to her and other newsletters here.

At the end of 2003, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to introduce a smoking ban at New York headquarters. Most chain-smoking diplomats rolled their eyes and complained about the move, but a senior diplomat fired back.

Sergey Lavrov, then Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Annan and proudly displayed the ban, continuing to light up in the headquarters building. “The UN building belongs to all member countries while the secretary general is just a hired manager,” he said at the time. The move was from the Lavrov era, senior diplomats said, and foreshadowed the brutal and acerbic approach to diplomacy he would later master as Russia’s top diplomat.

Lavrov is expected to return to his old playgrounds, no doubt to deliver the same kind of diplomatic digs to the United States and its Western allies, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly this week.

Over the course of his decades-long diplomatic career, Lavrov has perfected the body-blocking practice of American and European diplomacy at almost every major turning point and transformed it into a sinister art form. Russia blocked humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts in Belarus, Ukraine and Syria, with Lavrov extending diplomatic coverage to Syrian President Bashar al-Assadthe regime of after Assad committed war crimes against his own citizens.

Lavrov has defended Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests, including the forced immobilization of a European airliner to arrest a prominent opposition journalist in May. More recently, he has pushed back US efforts to station troops in Central Asia after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Western diplomats who clashed with Lavrov in difficult negotiations, often ending up empty-handed, adopted a nickname for him: “Minister Nyet”. (Nyet means “no” in Russian.)

Despite this, Lavrov commands reluctant respect from some of his Western counterparts, who admit that his experience and diplomatic prowess are hard to match. “He is about as expert as a foreign minister in the world today,” said John Negroponte, a former US deputy secretary of state who straddled Lavrov to the United Nations as his ambassador to the United Nations. George W. Bush at the UN from 2001 to 2004.

Former US national security adviser and UN envoy John Bolton described Lavrov as “knowledgeable,” “professional” and “assertive on behalf of Russia” in an interview with UN Brief.

Lavrov has gone through the transition from neophyte Soviet diplomat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man in foreign policy over the decades, which is no small feat in the Machiavellian world of Kremlin politics. Most experts agree this is because Lavrov is careful to stay in his lane as a foreign policy bureaucrat and to avoid any suspicion of threatening Putin’s grip on power.

Of course, there are always advantages to being a humble bureaucrat in Putin’s Russia: Lavrov owns real estate worth millions of dollars and a longtime companion who works in the Foreign Ministry and has more than $ 13 million worth of money. unexplained assets, recent organized crime and corruption reporting project investigation found.

Lavrov began as a junior diplomat at the Soviet Embassy in Sri Lanka in the early 1970s before gradually rising through the ranks of the Soviet and then Russian Foreign Ministry. Even early in his career, he stood out among his supervisors. “In the ministry, he was one of the brilliant guys,” said Andrei Kozryev, Russian foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, who has known Lavrov from his college days.

But the image of a debonair, chain-smoking diplomacy pro has started to fade in recent years, as Putin tightens his grip on power and the Kremlin increasingly relies on fishing. trolling, disinformation and scheming to undermine Western foreign policy objectives.

“When he was at the United Nations, I think he was well known for being quite courteous, witty, implementing what the Russian government wanted him to do,” said Angela Sent, a former military officer. US intelligence on Russia now at Georgetown University. “More and more, as relations with the West deteriorated, his reputation changed. He will now deliver speeches that reflect criticism of the one person he cares about: President Putin. “

Kozryev, once considered a daring reformer out of the Soviet era of glasnost and perestroika, said he was surprised by Lavrov’s trajectory. “I’m personally surprised because, like I said, he’s smart enough to know deep down that the Russians are now on the wrong side of history, so to speak,” Kozryev told UN Brief. “He can only understand that. So in that sense, I’m surprised.

But if Putin needs one man to deliver Moscow’s biggest messages to the United Nations, that remains Lavrov. “Speaking of his professionalism, he is one of the best,” Kozryev said. “And Putin probably understands that.”