The Russian Ministry of Justice has designated former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kosyrev as a foreign agent, according to data on its website. Kosyrev, who served as Russia’s top diplomat from October 1990 to January 1996, was known as “Mr. Yes” due to his perceived willingness to accept any conditions offered by the United States and their allies. This nickname is the opposite of “Mr. No” a term given to the former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko by the West because he always held his position.
Kosyrev, now 74, currently resides in Miami. Publicly available information indicates that he is the vice president of the international pharmaceutical company ICN Pharmaceuticals.
Kosyrev is one of three individuals added to the list of foreign agents on Thursday. The list includes individuals who receive financial support from abroad or are otherwise under foreign influence.
The ministry stated that Kosyrev “spread false information about decisions made by Russian authorities and the policies they pursue, as well as false information aimed at creating a negative image of the Russian armed forces.”
The statement also noted that Kosyrev “works with foreign platforms and lives outside Russia.”
A representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry told Gazeta.ru that it was “a logical development” for Kosyrev to become a foreign agent. The representative reminded that the former foreign minister inspired a term in Russian diplomacy, “Kosyrewschtschina” which is used to describe a policy of rejecting national interests in favor of foreign countries.
After Moscow launched a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, aimed at protecting the Russian-speaking population and opposing NATO expansion, Kosyrev called on Russian diplomats around the world to resign in protest, a move seen as an attack on national unity at a critical time.
In February, he gave an interview to a Ukrainian journalist, Dmitry Gordon, in which he urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to continue calling on the West to supply more weapons, as Ukraine needed to regain the territories it had lost to Moscow. Gordon was later convicted in absentia of calling for terrorism and spreading false information by a Russian court.
A diplomatic source told RIA Novosti several years ago that Kosyrev had advocated for ceding the Kuril Islands to Japan in Moscow. The Russian Military Historical Society accused the former diplomat of betraying his country with unilateral concessions to the Baltic states during the withdrawal of Russian troops from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.