January 16, 2023 - 10:30am
Since the Ukraine invasion, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been an ardent cheerleader for the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’. In February, he likened talking with then-UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to “speaking to a deaf person”, while at the UN Security Council in September he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “bastard” before departing early. With apparently no limits to his ambition, last month, Lavrov even sparred with the Pope, labelling him “un-Christian”.
But there are signs that being the public face of Putin’s revanchism has taken its toll. In November, reports emerged that Lavrov had been rushed to hospital during the G20 summit in Bali due to a heart condition (which Lavrov dismissed). And there are doubts over Lavrov’s own commitment to the war. “Sergei Lavrov can serve a good example of how Putin’s system transforms human beings and how fast they can degrade regardless of the starting point”, Nikolai Petrov, Senior Research Fellow in Russia and Eurasia at Chatham House, tells me. “I can’t imagine that he’s actually ideologically committed to this war, but like Putin’s other top nomenklatura guys he keeps his personal views, if any, at the very depth of his conscience, being just a cog in the bureaucratic machinery”.
Rumours persist that Lavrov and the Foreign Ministry as a whole were sidelined by Putin in the decision-making around the Ukraine invasion. Russian ex-Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev refused to comment on speculation that Lavrov learnt the invasion was going ahead when it actually started, while former US national intelligence officer Angela Stent has suggested the Foreign Minister “only knew it was happening as it was taking place”.
Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has claimed this is part of a broader tendency, whereby Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has become increasingly passive in foreign policy, no longer a “maker” but merely an “implementer”, with Putin and a small coterie of security and intelligence figures having taken the helm. Petrov agrees, saying that “it’s Putin who shapes foreign policy and the task for the Foreign Ministry is to implement it, minimise negative consequences and provide propagandist support for Putin’s decisions”.
Having ascended to the role of Russia’s Foreign Minister in 2004, Lavrov is one of Putin’s longest-serving ministers. It was here that the Kremlin’s top diplomat soon attracted a reputation for decidedly undiplomatic language, whether mumbling “fucking morons” during a 2015 press conference with the Saudi Foreign Minister or, in the same year, advising a crouching female reporter that it is “politically incorrect for a lady to address a gentleman on her knees”.
Despite an uncompromising bent which earned him the moniker ‘Minister Nyet’, Lavrov did enjoy surprisingly warm ties with his counterparts. In 2015, he and John Kerry gifted one another potatoes as a running gag, while he publicly bantered with the then-US Secretary of State the following year about their respective ages.
But, as the war drags on, Lavrov is unlikely to enjoy a comfortable retirement any time soon. While rumours circulated in 2018 of the minister seeking to leave his post, Petrov tells me that now “Putin wants everybody to stay onboard and there is almost no way to quit”. Whether he likes it or not, Lavrov is now here for the long haul.
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SubscribeProgressives prioritize metro votes to buy, commodities are produced in rural jurisdictions.
They need free trade to make sure they don’t have to buy votes from the rednecks.
I sure hope this costs them in the fullness of time.
The article read well until the author told us that he went to consult some weirdo who wears a horned hat about the underlying issues. I stopped reading after that.
I’m as triggered by a misattributed quote as the next pedant, but “Kissinger didn’t say it” is a bad take. Whoever coined it, “control food, control people” is terrifyingly true.
The mocking tone throughout this article is unworthy of UnHerd.
It is insane to cover agricultural land with solar panels.
Efforts to promote lab-grown “meat” and insects as food are sinister.
We should be wary of government efforts to undermine family farms.
Interesting that conspiracy theorists stick to thinks like food (they are poisoning it), vaccines (they have chips in them) etc.
Ignoring the one product that really does have a homunculus within that does not have your interests at heart – software.
Conspiracy theorist here
A wide range of views are dismissed under the conspiracy banner.
I haven’t seen convincing evidence for nanobots in vaccines, but there clearly has been a conspiracy to privatise profits and socialise risks, to push vaccines on low-risk groups (particularly for COVID, Hepatitis and HPV) and to exaggerate vaccine safety and efficacy.
What about food? There clearly has been a conspiracy to subsidise and promote unhealthy foods, especially in the US. Does the ruling class want us to eat addictive junk so that we’ll be unhealthy, infertile, and reliant on medical interventions? Or are those just happy side effects of a policy that’s mostly about maximising food revenue? Either way, corporations manipulate the government, and the government manipulates the people.
I see plenty of scepticism of Big Tech in conspiracy circles. There’s nothing inherently wrong with software; it’s as good or bad as the people who write it. Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond have almost certainly done more good than harm; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, probably the opposite. AI is inherently risky, but it’s especially dangerous in the hands of bad people.
What do the Coincidence Theorists and Incompetence Theorists make of all this?
If the aim of the WEF’s Agenda 2030 is that by the end of the decade we should own nothing (and be happy), then it’s only a small step to remove all our access to food. Then we can truly be replaced by a robotic army of workers driven precisely by the solar energy cells that are taking the land from the farmers.
It’s time for specialists to emerge as experts on the best bugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sow bugs and heads of locust for example, okay for lunch but you wouldn’t want them by candlelight in an expensive restaurant. You would want ladybugs or slugs au gratin.
Well, why not? “They” didn’t predict a “Pandemic”, they planned and created one.
Oh. A progressive hit job.
Furthermore, the quote from Gina Carano, whoever she is, is trenchant and appropriate: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening.”
There are too many things being foisted on us for reasons that are non-sensical, at best, to continue to simply dismiss the “conspiracy theories”. World War III, NetZero, open borders, the “next” pandemic, speech restrictions….
We deserve some answers.
Regarding welfare cuts, cuts to drug rehabilitation programmes, cuts to local food procurement and cuts to the world food program, the twin reasoning is to cut dependency on the State and encourage personal responsibility and to give States more financial control over procurement, both with the aim of slowing down national debt growth and releasing Federal funds to support any emerging domestic faultlines in the wake of his international economic reordering.
The reason why conspiracy groups are silent on this is an unknown other than, like the rest of us, we are waiting to see how the bigger picture unfolds. Similarly I imagine they have been somewhat placated by recent JD Vance interjections regarding the perceived tensions between MAGA populism and techno futurist libertarianism.
Food was exported from Ireland during the Famine but not from the congested districts of the West, the areas hit hardest from the famine and from which my own family fled to England – too poor to get to America. The Irish famine was not a case of market pricing out of the poor as was the case in Bengal, where the absence of imports from Burma and Churchill’s racist intransigence were also in play. It was a natural socio-ecological disaster and to be blunt more are coming. This is stupid article which displays no understanding of the vulnerability of food systems to over reliance on a limited crop base, shortage of key inputs notably phosphates, and the potential impact of global warming. David Byrne
Under Peel famine relief kept the population alive in Ireland. Under Russell, rigid laissez-faire orthodoxy saw a million die. HMG did spend 7 million on famine relief. They spent 20 million compensating slave owners in the Caribbean.
Famine and famine-related diseases have been the primary cause of civilian death in scorched-earth warfare for centuries, famously in the Hunger Plan of World War Two.
It was an accepted facet of warfare during the European wars of religion. If you could control your supply lines while destroying those of your enemy, you could lose every tactical battle and still retain strategic supremacy.
In Ireland between 10% and 40% of local populations were killed in military campaigns from the 1580s through much of the 17th century.
The accounts of decent English soldiers during the 9 Years War are fascinating, reflecting anguish at the suffering they were imposing on civilians while insisting it was a strategic imperative. One Captain Trevor even launched a campaign against cannibalism, executing old women who had killed and eaten children. It would have been all the more laudable if they hadn’t destroyed the food supply in the first place.
The irony is that this article is full of mockery of people out finds credulous. Sure these people are credulous in a way that is easy to mock, but their concerns are oriented towards a issue that it’s critical as even the author concedes. But the author’s thinking is the most credulous of all in a truly foolish and naive way – “they are cutting budgets for food program X!” – thinking that a program’s name represent what it actually does. I can assure you, in America virtually no school is buying local farm produce and cooking and putting it on plates in any meaningful way. But there is an initiative whose name suggests that, so you’re all twisted up about it.
What this really represents is left-brain thinking (mocking author who superficially grasps and thinks he knows it’s all) thinking it’s superior to right-brain thinking (embarrassing cranks who intuit that there are fundamental problems). Thank you Ian McGilchrist for showing how this underlies major human issues.
A contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism. Do you need to know any more?