Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared to be wearing a sweater with the letters “CCCP” — Russian for USSR — upon his arrival in Alaska.
Lavrov will be part of the Kremlin’s delegation when Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump meet later on Friday in a hotly anticipated summit to discuss the war in Ukraine.
Lavrov’s white sweatshirt was carefully hidden under a black gilet with only the middle letters “CC” clearly showing in a video posted on X.
The current Russian regime has repeatedly exploited USSR nostalgia to pursue its political and imperial goals, according to experts, with Putin calling the break-up of the Soviet Union the “greatest political catastrophe” of the 20th century during an address in 2005.
Moscow’s longing for the past has also been frequently linked to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the ensuing war, which Trump hopes to bring to an end in Alaska on Friday.
Before turning to politics, Putin himself worked for the KGB — the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency — serving as mid-level officer in Dresden in the second half of the 1980s, which back then was part of communist-ruled East Germany.
Kyiv and its allies fear Putin might make use of the methods he learned during that time to turn around Trump’s thinking — who in recent weeks appears to have become tougher on Moscow — during his one-on-one meeting with the Russian president.
Trump estimated the Alaska meeting had a 25 percent chance of failure, in which case he’d hold a solo press conference to announce “the war is going to go on,” reported CNN.
When asked about that estimate upon his arrival in Alaska, Lavrov told a Russian journalist: “We never try to anticipate the outcome or make any guesses. What we do know, however, is that we have arguments we can contribute to the discussion and that our position is clear. In fact, a lot has been accomplished already.”
The post Sergey Lavrov’s Alaska outfit hints at Soviet nostalgia appeared first on Politico.
