Russia’s first foreign minister following the break-up of the Soviet Union has said that Moscow’s foreign diplomats should quit their posts in protest of the war in Ukraine. Andrei Kozyrev, who was Russia’s top diplomat between 1990 and 1996 under President Boris Yeltsin, told Newsweek that Russian envoys had a responsibility to oppose the invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin. “Like the military, diplomats have a responsibility to their country to defend and to promote the interests of their country,” Kozyrev told Newsweek by phone from Washington, D.C. “The interest of the country is opposite to the interest of the Putin regime. Kozyrev said that there is the chance that some Duma parliamentarians might “believe their own propaganda,” in what might be a “conviction of convenience,” but diplomats who were abroad are not isolated from the truth of the Ukraine war. “They watch daily what we watch, television, radio stations, they know the truth. If you could suspect that some of those in the Duma are disoriented by the propaganda, these guys have daily access to free media. They cannot not claim for their conscience that they don’t know, they do know,” Kozyrev said. (https://www.newsweek.com/andrei-kozyrev-lavrov-russia-war-diplomats-ukraine-putin-1689491) He believed the resignation of diplomats and parliamentarians would pressure Putin more than any sanctions could.