On February 10, Russia celebrates the Day of the Diplomatic Worker. Ambassadors to Great Britain, Belarus, China and Israel spoke about the art of negotiating and the peculiarities of working in different countries.
This heavy metal door leads to an unusual facility for diplomatic institutions – a bomb shelter on the territory of the residence of the Russian ambassador in London. It was built during the Second World War. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once took refuge here. Then our countries were allies.
Relations and then were not simple. But today it is difficult to imagine that the current Prime Minister Johnson, just like his idol Churchill, was serenely drinking tea on the veranda of the Russian embassy. We are meeting with the owner of the residence, Russian Ambassador Andrey Kelin, at the moment when Foreign Minister Liz Truss is in Moscow on the initiative of the British side. Before leaving for Russia, she was unfriendly.
“The pre-flight statement she made shows that they don’t want to think about anything here, they just want to put pressure on it,” said Andrey Kelin, Russian ambassador to the UK. – Anti-Russian rhetoric in statements in parliament and officials. And when you talk to people, you come across the exact opposite – the attitude is normal, a good attitude.”
It is difficult to work in a pandemic: for diplomacy, where much is built on communication, lockdowns are an extreme regime. But solutions can be found.
Russian Ambassador to Beijing Alexei Denisov opened an account in the Chinese segment of the social network TikTok and, unexpectedly for himself, became a popular blogger. He has 744 thousand subscribers, and 10 million people watched the New Year’s address.
“In China, there is such an expression, if literally “the red man in the networks”, that is, the “star of the networks.” So I, to the surprise of my stay in Beijing, turned out to be such a character also popular in Chinese networks. I think it’s good There is a huge audience here, in general, they treat us very kindly, this can be judged by the comments that come to our appeals.
– Is this a plus for Russian-Chinese relations, fat?
– Well, of course, well, of course, a plus, in any case a plus, for any relationship it would be a plus. Another thing is that we here, of course, enjoy such, I would say, the benevolent attention of the audience. But you also need to make efforts to comply with it,” says Alexei Denisov, Russian Ambassador to China.
In January, Boris Gryzlov arrived in Belarus as the Russian ambassador. He has a colossal political and administrative experience: he served as chairman of the State Duma, was the Minister of Internal Affairs.
“You know, of course, experience is accumulated based on time in big politics – 22 years. And I think that I have the opportunity to communicate, make decisions, agree on issues that may be difficult, find compromises. And it seems to me that I should be able to “, – says Gryzlov.
Today, Boris Gryzlov faces the large-scale task of diplomatic support for the most important decisions on the construction of the Union State, taken in November last year.
“You can remember the European Union in 1951, a coal and metal union was created from 6 countries, these are the Benelux countries. That is, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany and France. When they turned into the European Union, in 1979, 28 years passed. I hope that we can shorten this period of development within the framework of building some kind of economic unions, political unions, and literally 2022-23 should be decisive for us to comply with all the necessary provisions on the creation of a union state,” says Boris Gryzlov , Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Belarus.
Relations with Belarus, of course, are difficult to compare with anything, but Russia and Israel have a very rich common history. In 1820, it was in Jaffa that the vice-consulate of the Russian Empire was established, the first in the Middle East. The construction of Russian Palestine in the Holy Land began.
“Temples of the Russian Orthodox Church were erected here, places were created to receive numerous thousands of pilgrims who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land,” says Anatoly Viktorov, Russian Ambassador to Israel.
The State of Israel itself appeared in 1948 thanks to the efforts of Russian diplomats who were able to promote the idea of its creation in the UN. There are almost two million people from the former Soviet Union here. But that doesn’t mean the job is easy. The country lives in a state of armed conflict and the state of emergency introduced in the same 1948 has not yet been lifted.
“Embassy staff, of course, are also living people. When the sounds of explosions are heard in the air and shells fly by, rockets, of course, any normal person is worried. There is an action plan, there is a scheme, who is responsible for what, what actions he takes, where he hides. everything has been worked out, of course. And, unfortunately, it was even tested last year. It was tested in a good way – it showed its efficiency, “says Viktorov.
Of course, it is better not to test the reliability of such protective measures in practice. The work of a diplomat is precisely related to the fact that conflicts are resolved peacefully – at the negotiating table.