Last week, NBC broke a story about three former U.S. officials meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov while he was in New York for a U.N. Security Council meeting. The report stated that these three former officials had “secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians.”
And so began a tempest in the Blob’s teapot. Did the Biden administration condone this backchannel? Was it a backchannel? And why wasn’t Ukraine in the room? After the NBC story, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had to come out and clarify that these were not negotiations and that the three former officials in no way represented the U.S. government in their conversation with Lavrov. These were “private American citizens,” Sullivan said on Friday, and “the United States government did not pass messages through that meeting. The United States government did not seek to pursue diplomacy, direct, indirect or otherwise through that meeting. Period.”
