Plenty of Russian officials see the election of Donald Trump to the White House as a chance to strike a Ukraine deal but also as an opportunity to start renegotiating everything in Russia’s relationship with the West — from arms treaties to the entire outcome of the Cold War.
This is something the Russian officials have been waiting to happen for a very long time: exactly a year ago, Alexander Yakovenko, head of the Russian diplomatic academy (and the Russian ambassador to the UK from 2011 to 2019), wrote a piece in the government’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta entitled, “The special military operation brings diplomacy closer.”
The war, he argued, would provide a starting point for the return of “diplomacy,” an idea that was essentially translated as forcing the West to a renegotiation of the world order with Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Yakovenko bitterly lamented the US and NATO’s refusal to discuss Putin’s December 2021 demands (for an alliance withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe and a future veto on expansion) that had aimed for a new grand bargain.
Now, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, Russians see improving prospects for a revival of Putin’s dream to reclaim the former Soviet space. Trump has always triggered an emotional response in Moscow, and not always in a positive way: there was jubilation among Russian officials in 2016 when Trump won his first term, but indignation two years later when Trump expelled 60 Russian intelligence agents from the US, more than any other country after the GRU poisoned Sergei Skripal and others in Salisbury.
Whether or not the Kremlin’s hopes of a historic deal are grounded in reality, some sort of agreement over Ukraine will be under discussion in the months to come. And that does mean that the Kremlin’s diplomats, who have taken a back seat as war rages, will step forward and take a more prominent role.
These men and women may be rather different from the traditional image of the foreign service official.
The Russian foreign ministry is incredibly stable on the surface: Minister Sergei Lavrov has been in charge for 20 years, but that can’t disguise the fact that the Russian diplomatic service has undergone dramatic changes during the war and is heading toward complete militarization.
That is most evident in MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the main Russian school for training diplomats. For some time now, MGIMO has been investing heavily in its students’ indoctrination on behalf of the “special military operation.”
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a new face of MGIMO became a 19-year-old student, Alexandra Trofimova, who went to the war as a voenkor, a Kremlin propagandist in the war zone. According to numerous stories in pro-Kremlin media, the attractive blond left her studies, parents, and fancy life in Moscow to be on the frontline.
She soon married an officer, who supposedly covered her with his body during Ukrainian shelling. Her photos in pro-Kremlin media show Trofimova in a variety of staged settings wearing camouflage and perfect make-up in trenches, with a backdrop of armored vehicles or in close physical proximity to a male. In February, Alexandra gave a welcoming address to Russian diplomats Lavrov and Anatoly Torkunov, head of MGIMO. She claimed that once she gave Torkunov a shell splinter, which had hit her bulletproof vest.
Last spring, the MGIMO launched a program for the veterans of the “special military operation.” A number of physically imposing shaven-headed individuals from the Donetsk People’s Republic were shown. The pictures may have been misleading, but did not suggest the recruits came from a traditional, academically demanding background.
This is not the only sign of MGIMO’s drift toward the militarization of diplomacy.
Since April last year, MGIMO’s students have also been involved in providing support to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine – students are routinely bussed to the FSB hospital to cheer up the wounded. In November, a student was awarded a medal “Together with Donbass” for her assistance in “integrating” people in occupied Ukraine. Early this week, a participant in the war in Ukraine (and an MGIMO graduate) came to his alma mater to give “a military-patriotic” speech for students.
In the Soviet Union and in Yeltsin’s and Putin’s Russia, the Foreign Ministry was under constant surveillance by the security services. The KGB had the 12th department of the Second Chief Directorate to supervise diplomats, which has been renamed by the FSB as the 13th service of the Department of Counterintelligence Operations – one of the most active departments in the FSB, which benefited enormously since the start of the war.
And yet, the current effort to ideologically indoctrinate the diplomatic corps is unprecedented and dramatic.
In 2019, Kadri Liik, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), published a significant paper on the new generation of Russian diplomats.
Based on her research and interviews with Russian diplomats, she concluded that although younger professionals were often bitterly disillusioned with the West, the youngest among them — those in their 20s — were free of such emotion, harboring an outlook that is sharply realist and pragmatic. Liik wrote that those young foreign policy professionals were neither Putin loyalists nor Western-style liberals: they were “wary of ready-made ideologies and preferred to attend to their consciences.”
It’s safe to say this is no longer true. The individual conscience has now been completely subordinated to the pro-war mentality.
Two months ago, the FSB attacked British diplomats. Unlike the traditional charges of espionage or interference in Russian internal affairs, this time, the accusations sounded slightly different: the FSB charged the Foreign Office with turning the FCDO’s Eastern Europe and Central Asian Directorate “into a special service to strategically defeat Russia.” The Russian Foreign Ministry quickly supported the FSB’s accusations.
A month later, the FSB followed up with a staged stunt at Vnukovo airport when deputy UK ambassador Tom Dodd was ambushed and jostled by a group of pro-Kremlin journalists and “protesters.”
Projection, as described by Sigmund Freud, is attributing to others what is in your mind. One might wonder whether the Kremlin and its people have fallen victim. It now accuses its enemies of turning diplomats into obedient soldiers in a war when it has done precisely that itself.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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