-By Special investigation for Lanka-e-News
(Lanka-e-News - 15.Oct.2025, 6.40 AM)
When most diplomats retire after a decade of serving under one president, Sergei Lavrov simply rewrites the rules of the game. The man who has served as Russia’s foreign minister since 2004, through the reigns of both Putin and Medvedev, has evolved from being a bureaucratic envoy into a master strategist — a man whose influence stretches from Kabul to Westminster.
While Western politicians change with elections, Lavrov endures. He doesn’t campaign, he calculates. And as the world reels from the consequences of conflicts, referendums, and economic shocks, many of the invisible strings trace back, quietly, to his “playbook.”
This second chapter of the Lavrov Playbook dissects his growing footprint across Afghanistan, Central Asia, Europe, and Britain’s Brexit saga — all threads of a single tapestry woven with the precision of an old Soviet chessmaster.
When the Taliban rode into Kabul in 2021, Western governments were paralysed by the images of helicopters evacuating diplomats and desperate Afghans clinging to planes. For Washington, it was humiliation. For Moscow, it was vindication.
Russia had anticipated this collapse years before. Lavrov’s ministry was one of the first to open dialogue channels with the Taliban, hosting delegations in Moscow even while the group was still officially designated as a terrorist organisation. At the time, Western diplomats scoffed; today, they study those meetings in astonishment.
Lavrov’s public argument was deceptively simple: Afghanistan needed stability, not isolation. Privately, he had a deeper objective — to remove Western military presence from Central Asia once and for all.
The fall of Kabul achieved just that. The Bagram Airbase, once the nerve centre of America’s war on terror, fell into the hands of forces no longer friendly to Washington. Lavrov didn’t just watch this unfold — he helped shape the diplomatic environment that made it inevitable.
His statements demanding that the international community release frozen Afghan assets and allow the Taliban access to global financial systems weren’t humanitarian gestures. They were the next moves in a calculated sequence:
Normalise the Taliban under Russian supervision.
Rebuild trade and intelligence routes through Russian-influenced states like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Create a new geopolitical corridor linking Moscow, Islamabad, and Tehran — effectively encircling U.S. influence.
By 2023, Russian oil and arms shipments were quietly passing through unofficial networks into Afghanistan, giving Moscow leverage without overt occupation. Lavrov’s fingerprints were everywhere, though rarely visible.
Lavrov’s mastery lies in his ability to subcontract influence. Realising that Russia could not economically dominate every region, he crafted a model of co-shared influence, particularly with India.
Through the Lavrov Playbook, India became the regional anchor for Russian diplomacy in South Asia, while Moscow focused on the heart of Central Asia — Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Together, these form the connective tissue between the Russian sphere and the Chinese Belt and Road initiative.
Lavrov’s doctrine is elegantly paradoxical: cooperate where possible, counter where necessary. While Beijing builds roads, Moscow builds relationships.
Russia provides the security umbrella — weapons, training, and intelligence. India provides the diplomatic veneer — cultural ties and trade networks. Together, they keep Western influence minimal in a region that both Moscow and Beijing see as their natural backyard.
In Armenia and Azerbaijan, Lavrov has perfected the art of balance. He brokers peace deals only to reassert Moscow’s indispensability. Every conflict resolution leads to renewed dependence on Russia — the geopolitical equivalent of prescribing a drug that only you can supply.
And then there is Georgia, the silent front. After the 2008 war, Russian tanks left scars; now, Lavrov uses ideology instead. Through the Georgian Dream Party, pro-Russian sentiment has been carefully cultivated under the guise of nationalism and economic pragmatism.
The Georgian Dream doesn’t march with Russian flags — it whispers Moscow’s arguments in Georgian accents.
This subtle political infiltration across Central Asia and the Caucasus is Lavrov’s diplomacy by proxy — he plants ideas, not armies.
If Lavrov’s influence in Afghanistan was visible, his hand in the Brexit referendum is a question whispered in the corridors of Western intelligence.
Was it mere coincidence that Britain’s most divisive political rupture in half a century also became one of Russia’s most profitable geopolitical outcomes?
For Moscow, Brexit was a dream come true: a weakened European Union, a distracted Britain, and a fractured Western alliance. It was the geopolitical equivalent of NATO shooting itself in the foot.
Western intelligence reports — notably from parliamentary inquiries in 2020 — hinted at Russian interference, though never conclusively proved it. What many analysts missed, however, was the philosophy behind it.
Lavrov didn’t need to hack ballots. He just needed to amplify discontent. Through media disinformation, cultural subversion, and the subtle sponsorship of far-right populist movements, the Lavrov Playbook played its quiet symphony.
By fuelling nationalism, Moscow created conditions for European fragmentation — each state turning inward, arguing about identity instead of strategy.
One senior European diplomat, speaking anonymously, described it this way:
“Lavrov doesn’t break democracies. He lets them break themselves while he hands them the tools.”
The Brexit campaign’s echoes of nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, and hostility toward Brussels were themes Moscow’s propaganda machinery had been promoting for years across Europe — from Hungary to France. Whether directly orchestrated or opportunistically supported, the Brexit mood fit seamlessly into Lavrov’s broader European doctrine: divide, distract, and dominate from the shadows.
The Lavrov Playbook has another defining trait — the outsourcing of ideology. Rather than overtly funding parties, Russia nurtures ecosystems: think tanks, media networks, and cultural associations that push anti-globalist, anti-EU rhetoric.
Across the continent, the fingerprints are faint but familiar:
In Italy, the rise of Matteo Salvini’s League, with its once-overt admiration of Putin.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy, often echoing Kremlin talking points.
In France, the National Rally receiving historic loans from Russian banks.
The pattern is consistent: every populist surge creates disunity in Brussels and paralysis in NATO.
Lavrov’s strategy is simple yet devastatingly effective — use democracy’s freedoms to erode democracy itself.
It’s not ideology; it’s geometry — carve the Western alliance into angles Russia can exploit.
Every playbook has its climax. For Lavrov, it was Ukraine.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea marked not just a territorial gain but a diplomatic milestone. For the first time since the Soviet collapse, Russia had successfully redrawn European borders — and lived to tell the tale.
Lavrov’s brilliance was in the narrative control. He turned aggression into defence, conquest into protection, and propaganda into policy. Crimea wasn’t an invasion, he argued, but a “correction” — a restoration of Russian heritage.
It was, in essence, diplomacy performed as theatre.
By the time Western nations responded with sanctions, Lavrov had already built parallel alliances with China, India, and a handful of Middle Eastern and African states. The Lavrov Playbook dictated that economic isolation could be offset by strategic diversification — and it worked.
Russia may have lost access to certain Western markets, but it gained political loyalty from the Global South. When the UN voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, dozens of countries abstained — the silent evidence of Lavrov’s global persuasion.
In recent years, his campaign to discredit Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as “anti-Russian provocateurs” has continued unabated. He paints them as pawns of NATO, portraying Russia as the cornered bear defending its lair. It’s an old Soviet trick repackaged for modern media — and it still works.
Lavrov’s real power lies not in armies or oil, but in language. His diplomacy is psychological — he understands that words, repeated enough times, become weapons.
He is fluent in manipulation. In every press briefing, he projects composure; in every confrontation, he performs exhaustion with Western hypocrisy. It’s a performance honed over fifty years in diplomacy — first at the United Nations, then as the unflinching voice of Moscow.
His tone is not explosive, but surgical. He cuts narratives apart, reframes them, and leaves opponents uncertain whether they’ve just lost an argument or a friend.
The Lavrov Playbook is thus not merely political — it’s linguistic warfare. It uses ambiguity as artillery and patience as strategy.
The connection between Afghanistan, Central Asia, Europe, and Brexit may appear tenuous at first glance. But in the Lavrov Playbook, they are interlinked chapters of one master strategy:
Remove Western military presence from Russia’s borders (Afghanistan).
Consolidate influence in Central Asia through partnerships (India).
Weaken the EU and NATO politically (Brexit and far-right populism).
Reclaim Russia’s regional dominance (Ukraine and the Black Sea).
Each move supports the next. Each success buys time for another. Lavrov doesn’t chase victories; he accumulates them.
And unlike the transient politicians of the West, Lavrov plays for decades, not election cycles.
Yet, for all his strategic cunning, the cracks are showing. The Russian economy, battered by sanctions, is bleeding slowly. The war in Ukraine has become an open wound. And Lavrov’s image — once that of the cold, calculating statesman — now carries the burden of an empire in decline.
Still, even as Moscow struggles, Lavrov endures. He continues to charm, to threaten, to manipulate, and to redefine the global conversation. To his admirers, he is the ultimate survivor; to his critics, the architect of deceit.
But no one denies his intelligence. In a world where diplomacy often descends into slogans, Lavrov remains the craftsman — ruthless, articulate, and unshakably strategic.
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, a new chapter of the Lavrov Playbook is being written — one that pivots toward Africa and Latin America, where Russia is trading guns for gold and ideology for loyalty.
From Mali to Caracas, Lavrov’s charm offensive is once again reshaping alliances that the West took for granted.
He is not seeking love. He is seeking leverage.
And perhaps that is the ultimate secret of Sergei Lavrov — he doesn’t need to win every battle. He just needs his opponents to lose focus.
-By Special investigation for Lanka-e-News
Link for Part One;
Playbook of Sergey Lavrov (Part I) - How a junior diplomat in Colombo learned the language of influence
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by (2025-10-15 01:21:22)
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