Failure of Trump Summit Could End Lavrov's Career

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who for more than two decades was considered the indispensable face of the Kremlin's foreign policy, has apparently come under a serious blow. The sharp weakening of his position was caused by an unsuccessful phone conversation with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which was followed by the collapse of the planned summit between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

The first visible sign of the Kremlin's dissatisfaction with Lavrov was his absence from the crucial Security Council meeting on November 5. It was during that meeting that Putin instructed the development of proposals for the resumption of nuclear tests, which Russia has not conducted since 1990. Although a source for "Kommersant" noted that the 76-year-old Lavrov was "absent by agreement," it is noteworthy that he was the only permanent member of the Security Council who was not present at the meeting.

However, the most painful blow was stripping him of his status as the head of the Russian delegation at the G20 summit. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that this year the delegation would be headed by Maxim Oreshkin, the deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration, and that the decision was made personally by Putin.

This is a highly unusual decision, as in the past, when Putin avoided international summits due to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (as in Bali in 2022, or Brazil in 2025), the Russian delegation was always led by Lavrov himself.

The start of this chain of events was set on October 21, when Lavrov had a telephone conversation with Rubio to discuss the terms of the upcoming Putin-Trump meeting in Budapest. However, the negotiations clearly failed: Rubio advised Trump to cancel the meeting, which was followed by new US sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil—the first since Trump's return to the White House. This failure, it seems, has not remained without consequences in the Kremlin for the veteran of Russian diplomacy.