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| A Symptom or a Cause? Russia’s Performance at the Munich Security Conference |
| 2019-02-16 |
| [Carnegie Russia] When Russian diplomats talk about Ukraine, they are actually speaking to just one man—Vladimir Putin. Moscow does not see any value in reaching out to the broad policy community in the West. The scary thing is that this behavior is not a consequence of the Ukrainian crisis, but one of its major sources. Russia’s performance at the recent Munich Security Conference (MSC), which culminated in Sergey Lavrov’s speech and the Western reaction to it, was accurately described by my Carnegie colleague Judy Dempsey as a “depressing and dangerous dialogue of the deaf.” Lavrov and later Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian Federation Council’s committee on foreign affairs, didn’t make any real attempt to reach out to the audience using language and arguments that could have made the Munich crowd understand Moscow’s stance on Ukraine and lay the foundations for dialogue. It’s not that Lavrov and Kosachev are incapable of this. They are among the most capable members of the current Russian foreign policy team—they speak good English, have vast experience with the West and could have found an appropriate way to present their narrative in a digestible format. Their actual performance shows not incompetence, but the delicate balancing act in which many members of Russia’s current foreign policy establishment find themselves. When Russian diplomats talk about Ukraine, they don’t speak to the people in front of them. Not even to the domestic audience. They are actually speaking to just one man—President Vladimir Putin. This explains, for example, the machine-gun speed in which Lavrov delivered his remarks in Munich. MFA people complain that this has become the minister’s style when delivering public addresses on Ukraine to international audiences. His office sometimes doesn’t even give the draft speech to the interpreters beforehand, which makes translation incomplete and inaccurate. Digestion of the information by the listeners thus becomes mission impossible. “It’s all about the transcript that will go to Kremlin, not about attempts to engage the audience,” people familiar with the matter say. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #1 Lavrov = Litvinov. What is it? The more the times change the more they remain the same. ?? |
| Posted by: Chereting Pelosi1889 2019-02-16 08:20 |