Inside the Kremlin college where envoys learn to deceive the West

Telegraph

18-04-2025

The Moscow State Institute of International Relations is the Oxbridge of Russia's foreign policy world and has trained the country's diplomats since Stalin's time.
Its graduates, who include Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, are known for their encyclopaedic grasp of international treaties and polyglot language skills, allowing them to argue the Kremlin's case in any corner of the world.
Yet, as Donald Trump may be about to learn the hard way, the warmer the words from a Kremlin envoy, the colder and more cynical the purpose. That, at least, is the warning from a whistleblowing former student of the school, who claims its doctrine is to 'speak diplomacy' but to 'practice coercion'.
In a rare insight into the inner workings of Kremlin foreign policy, Inna Bondarenko used an article in last week's Moscow Times to lift the lid on her years as a trainee diplomat at the school from 2015 to 2020.
'We were taught to cite international law while violating its spirit, to defend norms while dismantling them and to speak of peace while justifying and waging wars,' she wrote. 'Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. We deployed whichever claim of 'territorial integrity' or 'self-determination' suited the day's talking point.'
Ms Bondarenko's warning comes amid growing signs that Mr Trump's much-vaunted plans for a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia – announced to great fanfare a month ago – are coming to nothing.
In a sign of Washington's mounting frustration, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, warned on Friday that his country 'will move on' from trying to broker Ukraine peace efforts if there is no progress within the next few days.
Despite Vladimir Putin saying he wants a ceasefire, and praising Mr Trump for 'doing everything' to mend US-Russian relations, Moscow has continued to wage all-out war on Kyiv, including a missile attack on the city of Sumy last week that killed 34 civilians.
Such tactics, says Ms Bondarenko, exemplify the 'offensive realism' taught at the school – the opposite of the Western ideal of inter-state co-operation.
'Speak diplomacy, practice coercion,' she wrote. 'That isn't just hypocrisy, it's a strategy. It's the realpolitik we were trained to believe in and to carry out.'
In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Bondarenko, 27, who is from Russia's Kursk region, said she was overjoyed when she was first accepted to study at the school, which has tough academic selection criteria.
She said, though, that as Putin's regime became increasingly hostile to the West, the school's tutors followed suit. 'The brainwashing and propaganda was very strong, and as a young student you feel so overwhelmed to be at this centre of power. A lot of the professors there have worked for maybe 50 years in Russian policy, so whatever they say, you're expected to accept.'
Among the academics' shibboleths were that Crimea belonged to Russia, and that Serbian warlords had been wrongly prosecuted at the Hague over the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. 'We had one tutor [who] spent literally an hour defending Ratko Mladic [a convicted war criminal] and Slobodan Milosevic [who died during his war crimes trial], that blew my mind,' she said.
The faculty also had a 'cult-like' reverence for Mr Lavrov, who is known for his combative approach on the international stage.
A master of treaties, procedures and geography, he uses his knowledge to browbeat opponents, famously mansplaining to his opposite number Liz Truss over her ignorance of Russian provinces during talks in the run-up to the Ukraine war. At the same meeting, he also categorically denied that Russia was planning to invade.
Mr Lavrov, 75, still gives an annual lecture at the school, whose tutors also share his sexist attitudes, according to Ms Bondarenko. Female graduates, she said, are told from the outset that they will only ever become ambassador's wives.
'In our welcome ceremony, the dean said: 'I congratulate the boys on becoming future diplomats, and the girls on become future diplomats' wives'. This was a speech to some of Russia's smartest and most ambitious female students – you can't imagine how sexist the place was.'
Male students were also fast-tracked for service into the FSB spy service, she said, which had a secret office in the school and would groom the most promising students.
The school cultivated partnerships with campuses overseas, including Reading University, which ran a double masters on international relations and security. The course started in 2014 – the very year Russia annexed Crimea – with Reading only suspending ties with the school after the invasion in 2022.
'I am amazed that so many Western institutions kept their links up that long,' Ms Bondarenko said.
She is now studying for a masters at the European University Institute in Italy. 'Hopefully I will go back to Russia one day to work on human rights,' she said. 'I have no interest in being a diplomat – the more I learnt about our country, the more I realise that it has internal issues that need fixing first.'