It's always interesting reading the biographies of Russian diplomats and public figures:
Wikipedia snippet on Mikhail Bogdanov:
Mikhail Leonidovich Bogdanov (Russian: Михаил Леонидович Богданов; born 2 March 1952) is a Russian diplomat.[1] He is Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia and Special Representative of the President of Russia for the Middle East.[2] He is also Deputy Chairman of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society.[3][4][5]
Mikhail Bogdanov graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in 1974.[6]
As student at MGIMO, he was the captain of the MGIMO basketball team of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, later, he played professional basketball on the Lokomotiv (basketball club, Moscow).[1][a]
In addition to his mother tongue Russian, Bogdanov is fluent in Arabic and English.[1][2]
Mikhail Bogdanov worked in the Soviet embassies in South Yemen from 1974 to 1977, Lebanon from 1977 to 1980, Syria from 1983 to 1989, and Syria again from 1991 to 1994. He was Russian ambassador to Israel from 1997 to 2002, and ambassador to Egypt, and was concurrently Representative to the Arab League from 2005 to 2011.[6]
It's probably mostly just self-interested politics, but I still hope that some of these people have a bit of the Soviet spirit of anti-imperialism and international solidarity (and lord knows this Bogdanov has the looks).
Thanks for posting this lol. I love that the entire thing is completely libbed up including telling people to read the Guardian and Ha'aretz and then like you mention he name drops some left-wing media. The good episodes of Citations Needed are like highly corrosive acid to any of my wrongly-held liberal beliefs. Like the recent one about police body cameras. I don't think anyone's actually going to read this article and get hooked on but we can only hope.