Some years ago, in a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, Australia’s foreign minister, Julie Bishop, asked for a glass of water. Lavrov obliged by handing her a glass of Russian vodka. Julie Bishop drew a big gulp before she realised what had happened. Bishop is a tough cookie but coughed and spluttered. Lavrov thought it a wonderful joke. Spiking drinks. Hilarious. A bit of the old Russian humour.
Poor old Sergey looks sad now. He used to jet around the world to every exotic location imaginable from the White House down, feted wherever he went.
Now if he wants to travel overseas for a holiday, it’s a dacha in Byelorussia next to the cement factory.
While his overseas journeys have been truncated of late, he did appear as a speaker in New Delhi earlier this month at a foreign affairs conference known as the Raisina Dialogue.
Lavrov spoke at the conference uttering words so filled with fantasy they were met with barely stifled guffaws from seasoned diplomats.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people …” the Russian Foreign Minister spluttered. But before he could go on, the audience full of diplomats, business executives, and academics all burst out laughing.
So, it was on to an Aeroflot burner and back to Moscow where on Tuesday Lavrov opened the inaugural International Russophile Movement, a glittering event at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, wherein hang the works of Gaugin, Cezanne and Renoir, once considered too bougie for the proles during the Soviet Union and left to gather dust in garrets for decades.
Time is Monets so they’re back on the walls and their greatness was feasted on by an array of near-nobody Russophiles, including the grandson of Charles de Gaulle and Steven Seagal, who made a dreary movie about saving the life of the POTUS but would prefer to save Putin now.
Lavrov clinked a wine glass with a steak knife at the Pushkin, got to his feet and cleared his throat.
“Everyone is interested in being friends and simply maintaining good-neighbourly relations, implementing joint projects for mutual benefit.”
Pushing aside the obvious rejoinder that good neighbours don’t bomb neighbour’s civilian populations, Lavrov went on to babble that even speaking Russian in European cities had become a thought crime.
Putin also offered a welcome, albeit remotely. Apparently, there is now no table in Russia long enough for Vladimir to sit at one end and feel safe.
I couldn’t attend in person as I’ve been sanctioned by the Russian Foreign Ministry for something or other. It’s not immediately clear why. Possibly for poking fun at Putin’s man in Australia (if Putin knew who he was), the freedom movement’s own Simeon Boikov who is currently in self-exile in the Russian Consulate in Sydney’s Double Bay.
The grossly obese Boikov who sweats when he talks, has fashioned himself as a Russian version of WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange. Assange famously took up residence in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years to avoid the clutches of the wallopers. He was known, perhaps rudely, as Cupboard Boy but the truth is his digs within the embassy amounted to a converted toilet and ante room.
While Assange’s case is vexed with a debate over freedom of expression, Boikov’s flight from consequence does not quite leap to the same intellectual heights. He decamped to the consular building with warrants for his arrest issued after allegedly pushing an old man to the ground in the Sydney CBD.
In the interests of multilateral diplomacy and noting Lavrov’s calls for friendship, I extend my sympathies to Russia’s consular staff. I mean, who would want Simeon Boikov camped in their toilet for the foreseeable?
But back to other international Russophiles. The leader of this august group of admirers of cold, purple soup and other things Russian is Nikolai Malinov, a former parliamentary deputy from the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).
Malinov has been charged with a host of offences in his native Bulgaria, including espionage and money laundering. Malinov is accused of accepting payments for transferring Bulgarian state secrets to two Russian organisations – the Double-Headed Eagle Society and the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, the same institute accused of election meddling in the US.
He’s looking at a 15-year stretch in Bulgaria but in Moscow, at the Pushkin, possibly with a van Gogh staring down at him, Malinov had a medal of some sort pinned to his chest.
Of particular interest is Malinov’s party affiliation, a centre left, social democratic party.
I’ve often said you can discover a lot about an individual’s politics when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The supporters of Putin’s folly fall into two camps – those on the Left, best depicted by the UK Labour Party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn and his offsider and former highly paid policy adviser, Andrew Murray and those on the Right characterised by US congressman, Matt Gaetz, who is pushing for the US to stop funding Ukraine’s defence.
Whether it’s the big wigs of the Stop the War protest movement in the UK or the brow furrowed anti-war babble from the Right, calls for peace, love and pacifism are a bit of a stretch, frankly. They don’t want the war to stop. They simply want Ukrainians to lie down and let Russian tanks roll over them.
Corbyn on the left hates NATO and hates the US. Always has, always will. At least there’s some consistency there.
As an aside, his bestie, Andrew Murray (the former trade unionist, not the tennis player) established a tea party collective known as the Stalin Society in honour of old Joe who Murray and Co. believe has been dealt a low blow by historians. The arguments goes, never mind the millions slaughtered or the tens of millions starved, how about Stalin’s housing policy?
Those on the extreme left are just that dumb.
The big change comes from the hard right, which less than 10 years ago was bemoaning the Islamification of Europe and the death by stealth of western civilisation. In a stunning aboutface, they now support Puitin’s invasion of Ukraine, urge the Russians to conquer it and demand the US acquiesces and allow it to happen.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
Russia’s list of celebrity followers, the Russophile Internationale, may be of the Z-grade type but its political supporters remain strong around the world. The good news is it’s easy to spot them. They are either from the extreme left or the hard right.
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