Sergey Lavrov is the Russian foreign minister, and was Russian ambassador to the United Nations during the period John Kiriakou was assigned there. The two worked the same Security Council, and Kiriakou’s assessment of him has not moved in twenty years: “literally everybody respected him. He is one of the most accomplished diplomats anywhere on the planet. I’ve never met anybody that didn’t have respect for Sergey Lavrov.”[1][2]
The assessment
Kiriakou raised Lavrov in conversation with the Russian ambassador in Washington, and describes the view from inside the American mission at the time: “All of us admired him because he was such a good diplomat, and he was working with so much less than what the other major Western ambassadors were working with.”[3]
The comparison he draws is resource for resource. The American ambassador then was Negroponte, who Kiriakou says had a billion-dollar budget and the might of the United States behind him; the British, French and Chinese ambassadors all likewise had more to work with than Lavrov. “Yet he was seen as the most powerful, the most important, the most strategic ambassador at the United Nations.”[4]
Told first-hand, the judgement is comparative in a more pointed way. Having worked with Lavrov at the Security Council, Kiriakou calls him “a very, very, very impressive diplomat — better than most American diplomats for whom I worked.”[5][6]
Kiriakou’s explanation
He puts the gap down to what the American mission was actually doing. “Why wasn’t it the American ambassador? Because the American ambassador wasn’t focused on diplomacy” — he was focused on America’s many wars around the world.[7]
Kiriakou treats this as a pattern rather than a personal failing, and part of a wider argument that other countries overtake the United States economically while it attends to its wars.[7]
The man rather than the politician
The character sketch Kiriakou gives is of someone with no ambitions beyond the job. Lavrov “has no political aspirations in Russia at all. He’s a diplomat. He just likes to be a diplomat” — and he is intensely loyal.[6]
That reading governed Kiriakou’s response when Lavrov was suddenly sidelined from a Security Council meeting in November 2025 and dropped from the Russian delegation to the G20, a development Kiriakou said surprised him a great deal. If something was going on behind the scenes, his “educated guess” was that Lavrov “will just retire quietly.”[5][8]
Asked the next day whether Lavrov was in a gulag and whether Vladimir Putin had been made nervous by his influence, Kiriakou dismissed both: something had been said or done that seemed to push Lavrov out of the innermost circle, perhaps temporarily, but “I don’t think Lavrov’s in any kind of danger. I think the worst thing that could happen to him is that he’s told that it’s time to retire.” He is old, Kiriakou added, and not wearing his age as well as Putin is.[9][10]
As a source on Russian policy
Kiriakou also uses Lavrov’s public statements as evidence in his own analysis. After the invasion of Ukraine, he notes, Lavrov said the Russians had been surprised by the speed with which the United States imposed sanctions — enough to knock them off kilter for three or four weeks, until they worked out that they did not really need the United States or the American banking system when they could turn to the Indians and others instead.[11][12]
He read the composition of the Russian delegation to the Alaska summit the same way — Putin arriving not merely with Lavrov but with a contingent of his most important diplomats was, to Kiriakou, the signal that this was an actual summit rather than a photo opportunity, with Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio joining Trump on Air Force One at the last second in response. Coming out of the meetings, Lavrov said at least some sanctions would be lifted — not all, and he did not say which.[13][14][15]
Cooperation despite hostility
In the same conversation with the Russian ambassador, Kiriakou set out a position he says he holds regardless of how bad relations become: “I don’t care how hot the war gets, we can still cooperate on counterterrorism, counter narcotics, and counter proliferation” — differences that should be set aside on questions important not just to the two countries but to everybody.[16][17]