A very welcome addition to their ranks is Ian Proud, economic counsellor in the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014-2019. A highly experienced diplomat, Proud served in Thailand and Afghanistan, organized the G8 summit in Belfast in 2013 and, in 2022, retired from the Foreign Office as Vice Principal of its International Academy — the body charged with the foreign-language training of British diplomats. Perhaps his finest hour was the part he played in the smooth running of the football World Cup in Russia in 2018, when tens of thousands of English soccer fans descended on Moscow and other match venues.
Unlike the vast majority of his colleagues in Moscow, Proud took the trouble to learn Russian and to travel the country far and wide, meeting officials, politicians, academics, students and ordinary people.
A self-professed “realist,” Proud believes the core purpose of diplomacy is to manage relations between states and to prevent conflict. In Moscow, according to his memoir published late last year, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British Diplomacy in Russia Failed, 2014-2019, he was appalled by the “utmost folly” of attempting to resolve “disputes with Russia through isolation and cancellation.” […]
Proud claims that Moscow had to real interest in implementing Minsk either, but it seems to this reviewer that the public record shows Russia was probably the only party to those agreements acting in good faith. Certainly, in run-up to the Russian invasion, Putin was incessant in his insistence that implementation of Minsk was the only way to resolve the Ukrainian crisis peacefully. Läs presentationen