Kozyrev, Andrei Vladimirovich (1951– )

Russian politician, foreign minister 1991–95. Appointed by Boris Yeltsin as Russia's foreign minister while it still had no official foreign policy as part of the USSR, Kozyrev inherited in January 1991 a ministry that had been headed by Andrei Gromyko and, under Mikhail Gorbachev, Edvard Shevardnadze.

Like his economic colleagues, he was forced to change track and develop a policy that sought to emphasize Russia's dominant role among former Soviet states and was increasingly critical of Western, especially US, policies, particularly in the Balkans. He was, however, unable to stop or even to disguise convincingly the rapid decline of Russia's power in the world; under him – though not because of him – Russia sank from being at least formally the second superpower to being an ailing giant. He never succeeded in elaborating a foreign policy, largely because all policies were overtaken by the speed and scale of Russia's collapse.