Lavrov’s last tango: Putin’s summit failure and the Foreign Ministry's meltdown.

They finally screwed it up. The Putin-Trump Budapest summit is toast, and guess who’s holding the flaming bag of diplomatic failure? None other than the seemingly immortal, eternally grim Sergey Lavrov.

This was a full-blown self-own. The whole point of getting a meeting with Trump was to look like a legitimate player on the world stage, bypass the Europeans, and cut a deal to cement Russia’s gains in Ukraine. The last thing Putin needed was to act like a bunch of belligerent children giving an ultimatum. But that’s exactly what the Foreign Ministry delivered.

Sources from all over—and I mean all over, even some who usually sip tea with the Foreign Ministry hacks—are saying the same thing: Lavrov came to the pre-summit call with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio completely unprepared and refused to negotiate.

He didn’t try to find a creative loophole or a diplomatic bridge. He just robotically repeated the maximalist, conquer-or-die demands straight out of the Kremlin’s most rigid instruction manual.

The result? Rubio hung up and told Trump: “Forget it. They don’t want a deal. They just want a surrender.”

And just like that, the high-stakes summit, meant to be Putin’s big score, was scrapped.

Washington isn't playing ball with threats. Did they really think they would?

Now the blame game is on, and it’s a beautiful mess.

The Russian Foreign Ministry is running around like headless chickens, trying to tell everyone through their tame newspaper, Kommersant, that it was all Rubio's fault. “We were just following old agreements from the Alaska summit!” they whine. “We sent a ‘non-paper’ that was totally fine!”

The only thing they proved is that they're terrified. Lavrov, Putin’s supposedly unflappable, iron-willed Foreign Minister, is now reportedly "depressed" and the center of some serious Kremlin intrigue.

Word is, Putin was absolutely livid. The stakes were huge. Failing here is a massive political defeat. Some in the inner circle were apparently even whispering the word "sabotage" against Lavrov for derailing this critical summit. That's a classic sign of a political corpse walking.

Like Shoigu before him, Lavrov has gone from a powerful figure to a "weak link" whose job is now to wear the blame for the leadership’s strategic failures.

Proof of Lavrov’s collapse? Look who was dispatched next: Kirill Dmitriev, head of the RDIF and Putin’s unofficial backchannel guy. Dmitriev, a man whose entire job is to be the friendly, Western-educated face who keeps the dialogue alive, flew privately to Washington in a frantic act of damage control.

This move completely undercuts Lavrov. It shows the Russian dictator has zero faith in his top diplomat’s ability to clean up his own mess. Lavrov’s mistake wasn't just being rigid, it was ignoring the pragmatists like Dmitriev and Yuri Ushakov (Putin’s foreign affairs aide). He thought his "hard-line" approach was what Putin really wanted.

It wasn't. It was what Putin wanted if it worked. When it fails, you don't get a medal for following instructions. You get thrown under the bus for a lack of "negotiation skills."

And to top off the humiliation, a Financial Times article detailed the mess was likely commissioned by his rivals. That’s a classic Kremlin power play: use the Western press to finish off a weakened opponent.

The moral of the story? In Putin's Russia, you can follow orders perfectly, but if the outcome is failure, it's still your fault. Lavrov's tenure at the Ministry looks like it’s entering its final, desperate chapter.

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