Putin’s Pied Piper Plays the U.N.

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s longtime foreign affairs minister, returned this week to his familiar stamping grounds at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where he served for almost a decade as Moscow’s ambassador before moving into his current role in 2004. The visit was the culmination of his recent whirlwind global tours in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where he pitched the Kremlin’s vision of a multilateral world order and sought more support for what has become, in the eyes of the West, nearly an outlaw regime.

Russia, which holds the rotating U.N. Security Council presidency this month, used the platform to discredit the idea of a rules-based system to protect basic human rights, turning that system on its head and claiming that it was a cynical attempt by Western countries to infringe on national sovereignty. Normally, when a country’s foreign minister chairs a high-profile session, the other council members send top brass of their own. But with Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine entering its second year, nearly the entire Security Council sent their usual U.N. representatives, relative diplomatic second fiddles, as a deliberate rebuke to Russian pretensions to respectability. As an added touch, the sister of Russia’s prisoner, American Paul Whelan, sat in the first row of the visitor’s gallery, staring stony-faced directly at Lavrov.

Not even China, which is becoming Russia’s staunchest supporter in their joint bid to tear up the global rulebook, sent its foreign minister, noted Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. Lavrov had “always retained this rather overwhelming sort of star status as the diplomat who was a real master of U.N. procedure,” Gowan said. The underwhelming welcome this year made the “lion” of Russia’s diplomacy look a bit like “a big cat in a petting zoo,” he said.

Lavrov’s diplomatic grand tour has aimed to project the Kremlin’s narrative that economic sanctions and widespread criticism of its war in Ukraine have not left it isolated on the world stage. Russian President Vladimir Putin has an ideal pitchman in Lavrov, who has carved out a strikingly similar career path to that of the Kremlin’s first U.N. ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, known in the 1940s as Mr. Nyet, because of his frequent use of Moscow’s veto as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Lavrov loves vetoes just as much, but he also likes gaslighting. In a 25-minute speech opening the Security Council debate on multilateralism, he referred to grassroots democratic color revolutions in former Soviet states as Anglo-Saxon criminal misadventures, and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an existential struggle to protect Russian speakers from exuberant torch-bearing marches in the heart of Kyiv. 

On balance, Lavrov’s recent diplomatic overtures have been a mixed bag and don’t seem to be bringing many new converts inside Russia’s big-tent show. They resulted in at least one moment of genuine hilarity, when the audience at the G-20 meeting in India in March laughed after he said the war in Ukraine was launched against Russia. Some of his other visits were to countries—like Eritrea, Mali, and Nicaragua—that were already among the handful taking Moscow’s side when the U.N. General Assembly rebuked it on the anniversary of the full-scale invasion. Other visits included stops in countries—Angola, Cuba, South Africa, Sudan, and Vietnam—that abstained on that vote, which called for an immediate end to the war.

But this week, South Africa, which Lavrov visited in January, gave confusing signals about whether it might withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) ahead of a planned trip by Putin there in August. Countries that are in the ICC have an obligation to execute arrest warrants, and Putin has been served with an ICC warrant for organizing the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

Western countries lined up to counter Lavrov’s arguments. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.N. ambassador from the United States, called Russia’s decision to convene a meeting on multilateralism and the U.N. charter “hypocritical” after the country’s invasion of its neighbor “struck at the heart of the U.N. Charter.” Nicolas de Rivière, France’s ambassador, said that Russia has been “violating the core principles of the international order.” And Barbara Woodward, the United Kingdom’s ambassador, said she saw “nothing effective nor multilateral in Russia’s foreign policy.” 

More critical to Russia is the diplomatic relationship with Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin have sworn to a “no limits” partnership. Xi even went so far as to declare during a state visit to Moscow last month that, “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we have not seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.”

And sure enough, Chinese U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun’s statement broadly aligned with Russia’s—for example,  by criticizing the “so-called rules-based international order.” In its place, Russia and China championed a multipolar world order that would apparently be led by the countries in the BRICS coalition, which also includes Brazil, India, and South Africa. Zhang reserved his harshest critique for economic sanctions, describing them as being “like a rampaging monster.” 

Beijing is trying to plan ahead for when broader Western sanctions take aim at China, said Nadège Rolland, a distinguished fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, who previously served for two decades as an Asia analyst at the French Defense Ministry. “The China-Russia partnership is extremely strong and is fundamentally based on a common understanding and a common aspiration for a future that is without the West,” she said. “The whole program of Xi Jinping’s vision for China’s future as a world leader rests on this partnership with Russia.”

But even between China and Russia, there are apparently some limits. About the time Lavrov was grandstanding, Chinese officials took the unusual step of contradicting one of their own officials after the country’s ambassador to France appeared to question not only the sovereignty of Ukraine, which was a founding member of the United Nations, but of all the former Soviet republics. In a French television interview on April 21, Ambassador Lu Shaye had said that “these ex-Soviet countries don’t have an effective status in international law.” But a few days later, Beijing was backpedaling, and on Wednesday, Xi made a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Tara Varma, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, said that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had clearly disavowed Lu’s comments, and the conversation with Kyiv may have unnerved Moscow.

By then, Lavrov had left the building. Russia had brought its new world order rhetoric into the Security Council chamber, but with much of the world still arrayed against it, and economic sanctions and international opprobrium still pounding Moscow, it’s not clear Putin or Lavrov had ever really been in the driver’s seat.

Correction, April 28, 2023: A previous version of this article misstated the location of the G-20 meeting in March 2023.