Meet Comrade Lavrov - Putin's liar-in-chief

Russia's foreign minister claims Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis, denies the invasion, and has a very colorful love life.

As Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov's job is to deliver his president's in the past fortnight, he has pushed Vladimir Putin's dystopian narrative to the brink: “We didn't even attack Ukraine," he said in Turkey; “the West is plotting a nuclear strike on Russia"; Ukraine is run by “neo-Nazis and drug addicts"; the Kremlin is engaged not in a bloody war but a “special military operation” to prevent genocide. At the UN in Geneva last week, Moscow deployed Lavrov on the video to baselessly rail against the West; hundreds of diplomats staged a walkout. A day later, he lashed out at "emotional" journalists and compared America to “Napoleon and Hitler”. He is "largely out there to be rude to foreigners these days”, says one former high-level UK security adviser. “He's very much his master's voice." (Of UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss Lavrov said: “The conversation we're having turns out to be a bit like a deaf person talking to a blind person")

At the top of Russia's foreign ministry for more than 50 years, Lavrov is a grizzled master of diplomacy who worked through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the thaw with the West, and back to square one again. He's also thought to own hundreds of millions of dollars of property and other assets. "He's one of the last deeply Soviet diplomatic figures”, says Ben Judah, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center.