{"id":2193,"date":"2025-08-18T12:13:41","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=2193"},"modified":"2025-08-18T12:13:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:13:41","slug":"russias-lavrov-wears-cccp-shirt-in-alaska-ahead-of-trump-putin-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/?p=2193","title":{"rendered":"Russia’s Lavrov Wears CCCP Shirt in Alaska Ahead of Trump-Putin Summit"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The Russian government is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Ahead of a highly anticipated summit on the Russia-Ukraine war in Alaska on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov engaged in some blatant trolling.<\/p>\n

Lavrov arrived in Alaska wearing<\/a> a CCCP sweatshirt. Those are the Russian initials for \u201cUSSR,\u201d which stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union). Experts say that Lavrov, who has been Russia\u2019s top diplomat for roughly two decades, knew exactly what he was doing by wearing that sweatshirt. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t do this just by chance,\u201d former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said of Lavrov\u2019s sweatshirt via X<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The Russian government is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Ahead of a highly anticipated summit on the Russia-Ukraine war in Alaska on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov engaged in some blatant trolling.<\/p>\n

Lavrov arrived in Alaska wearing<\/a> a CCCP sweatshirt. Those are the Russian initials for \u201cUSSR,\u201d which stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union). Experts say that Lavrov, who has been Russia\u2019s top diplomat for roughly two decades, knew exactly what he was doing by wearing that sweatshirt. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t do this just by chance,\u201d former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said of Lavrov\u2019s sweatshirt via X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The war in Ukraine\u2014a former Soviet republic\u2014is widely viewed as a product of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and imperialistic ambitions.<\/p>\n


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A tweet by Yaroslav Trofimov shows Lavrov walking from a car into a building wearing a CCCP shirt under a black vest.<\/figcaption>

A post on X by the Wall Street Journal\u2019<\/em>s Yaroslav Trofimov includes a video that shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov walking from a car into a building wearing a CCCP shirt.X screengrab<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Putin once referred<\/a> to the collapse of the USSR as the \u201cgreatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.\u201d And, after ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he compared himself to Peter the Great<\/a>\u2014effectively portraying himself as a righteous conqueror who\u2019s fighting to restore control over what he views as Russian lands (much of Ukraine was also previously part of the Russian Empire).<\/p>\n

The Russian president, a former KGB officer, has also repeatedly suggested that Ukrainians and Russians are \u201cone people\u201d and said<\/a> in June that \u201cthe whole of Ukraine is ours.\u201d Putin has falsely claimed<\/a> that Ukraine, which gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, isn\u2019t a real country and was created by Russia.<\/p>\n

Along these lines, Lavrov\u2019s choice of attire garnered a fair amount of attention in terms of the message it appeared to send about Russia\u2019s mentality heading into the Alaska summit between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, told Foreign Policy<\/em> that Lavrov\u2019s CCCP sweatshirt suggests that Moscow is taking the meeting \u201cseriously\u201d but \u201cnot in terms of achieving a peaceful settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia views the summit as \u201canother opportunity to flaunt that they have no respect for this U.S. administration,\u201d Hodges added.<\/p>\n

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, posted<\/a> on X that Lavrov was \u201ctrolling Trump\u201d with his sweatshirt. Meanwhile, former Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis posted<\/a>, \u201c\u2018Just give us half of Ukraine and we promise we will stop\u2019 says negotiator wearing USSR sweatshirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another move that could be seen as an effort to troll Ukraine and the West, the Russian journalists\u2019 in-flight meal en route to Alaska was apparently chicken Kiev<\/a>\u2014a dish bearing the name of the Ukrainian capital (albeit with its Russian spelling).<\/p>\n

Ukraine and its supporters have been nervous in the lead-up<\/a> to the meeting, worrying that Putin doesn\u2019t genuinely desire peace and that he\u2019ll attempt to manipulate Trump into embracing a framework for a peace agreement that\u2019s bad for Ukraine. Trump has also downplayed expectations for the summit, but as he traveled to Alaska on Friday, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he wants to see a cease-fire \u201ctoday<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hodges said he has \u201cvery low expectations for this so-called summit,\u201d adding that Trump\u2019s threats of \u201csevere consequences\u201d for Russia if there\u2019s no cease-fire agreement \u201cring hollow, since the president has done this already five or six times, without any actual consequences for Russia, and Putin knows this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s approach is of a businessman from the late 1990s working a real estate deal in Manhattan,\u201d Hodges said.<\/p>\n

Trump is set to meet with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, around 11:30 am local time (3:30 pm ET). If the meeting is constructive, the pair are expected to hold a joint press conference at the end of the summit. The meeting was previously billed as a one-one-one between Trump and Putin but will now reportedly be three-on-three<\/a>. Trump will be joined by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Putin will reportedly be joined by his aide Yuri Ushakov and Lavrov.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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This post is part of FP\u2019s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration<\/i>. <\/i>Follow along here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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The Russian government is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Ahead of a highly anticipated summit on the Russia-Ukraine war in Alaska on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov engaged in some blatant trolling. Lavrov arrived in Alaska wearing a CCCP sweatshirt. Those are the Russian initials for \u201cUSSR,\u201d which stands for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politcical-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmupgrades.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}