Vitaly gutkin russian linguist7/28/2023 ![]() He returned to Moscow in 1987 shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev’s “revolution from above” became a “revolution from below”, with nationalist pressures developing in the Baltic states and the Caucasus, anti-communist street protests becoming an everyday affair in many Soviet cities, and economic problems mounting.Ĭhurkin worked in the international department of the Soviet Communist party’s central committee and in 1990 was appointed to lead the foreign ministry’s information department. The Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, chose his junior colleague to parry questions on the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster because of his almost flawless English and his diplomatic charm – as well as his technical expertise. There he made history in 1986 by becoming the first Soviet official to testify before a Congressional committee. After three years in Moscow as a third secretary on the US desk in the foreign ministry, he was posted to Washington in 1982. On graduation in 1974 he spent the next five years negotiating with the Americans as a diplomat in the Soviet team at the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (Salt) talks, a post that required him to master a huge amount of technical detail on nuclear weapons. After he left school he attended the prestigious Moscow State Institute for International Relations, the main training ground for prospective high flyers in the Soviet foreign service. He starred as an 11-year-old in a film about Lenin and in two other films over the next three years. So of course we would like Bashar al-Assad to take account of that.”īorn in Moscow, Churkin showed considerable acting talent as a child. Russia has invested very seriously in this crisis, politically, diplomatically, and now also in the military sense. Of course they do not chime with the diplomatic efforts that Russia is undertaking … The discussions are about a ceasefire, a cessation of hostilities in the foreseeable future. Churkin promptly responded in the Russian newspaper Kommersant with a politely worded but clear rebuke: “I heard President Assad’s remarks on television. A few months after Russia started to use its air force in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad told an interviewer in February 2016 that he aimed to win back all of Syria from opposition forces. While often sharp with western representatives in the cockpit of the security council, Churkin also had enough confidence and Kremlin backing to criticise Russia’s allies in public. Give us one fact, please, or leave this kind of storytelling for the novel you may well write later.” If we wanted to hear poetry, we would go to a theatre. Then maybe your conscience might be clearer and you could discuss other topics.”Ĭhallenged over civilian casualties caused by Russian bombing in Aleppo by the former British diplomat Stephen O’Brien, who had become the UN’s relief co-ordinator, Churkin said: “If we wanted to hear a sermon, we would go to church. Churkin said: “Return the Malvinas, return Gibraltar. Two weeks before his death he went on the diplomatic attack when the British UN ambassador, Matthew Rycroft, called on Moscow to “return Crimea” to Ukraine. When she condemned Russian bombing in Aleppo, he responded by recalling US carpet-bombing of Vietnam. He once accused her of making a “strange” speech as though she were Mother Teresa, a role that the US record of intervention in the Middle East did not justify. Churkin consulted the security council’s five permanent members on these resolutions, but chose not to provoke vetoes when he realised there was no consensus.Ĭhurkin’s rhetorical fire was directed especially at Samantha Power, his US counterpart, who had no previous diplomatic experience before she took up the post. Russia preferred to produce resolutions that criticised the Syrian army for using “disproportionate” force and sought agreement on ceasefires. This applied particularly to the war in Syria, about which western governments tabled resolutions that could lead, in the Russian view, to full-scale military intervention against the Syrian government and which they knew Churkin was bound to veto. ![]() He hated the moralising tone of his US, British and French counterparts on the UN security council who, he felt, were not only hypocritical but were playing to the global gallery and aiming to score rhetorical points instead of looking for compromises that could lead to the resolution of differences.
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