Did President Trump just collect his first scalp in the Kremlin? Whispers are growing at Moscow to the effect that President Vladimir Putin is souring on his longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The trigger for what seems to be a cooling of a storied friendship at the apex of Moscow’s officialdom is the decision in the White House on October 22 to cancel a summit on ending the Ukraine war.

“I didn’t want to do that meeting because I didn’t think anything was going to be happening of significance,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday. Last month he announced the summit’s cancellation shortly after a “tense” phone call between Mr. Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Following that call Mr. Rubio “told Trump that Moscow was showing no willingness to negotiate,” the Financial Times reported at the time. 

“Lavrov was unprepared for the dialogue with Rubio and conducted it in an extremely tense manner, refusing to engage in a discussion with the Secretary of State,” a Russian Telegram channel with 400,000 followers, Nezyger, reports, citing an unidentified source. At the age of 75, and after 21 years as Russia’s foreign minister, and a decade as ambassador to the United Nation, Mr. Lavrov has reportedly asked to retire several times before. 

The difference now seems to be that Mr. Putin appears eager to reshuffle his foreign ministry, even as officially his flacks are pushing back against such intentions. “There is nothing true in these reports,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Friday. He added that Mr. Lavrov “is certainly continuing to serve as foreign minister.” Remember, though, that Mr. Peskov denied any plans to invade Ukraine — two days before Russia did exactly that.

The source of the extra buzz over Mr. Lavrov’s fate is his absence from events in which he used to be front and center. On Tuesday, Kremlinologists noticed that he conspicuously skipped a crucial meeting of Mr. Putin’s security council. A lower-ranked official was dispatched to lead a delegation to the upcoming G-20 summit. Also, Mr. Lavrov was uncharacteristically absent from last week’s ASEAN summit in Malaysia, which Mr. Trump attended.

Per Russian press accounts, Mr. Lavrov lost favor after the phone call with Mr. Rubio. The sharp-tongued but ever cautious Russian diplomat lost his cool, they claim. Conversely, though, it could be that he followed Mr. Putin’s instructions to show toughness, which raised Mr. Trump’s ire. Regardless, if Mr. Putin is ready to throw his longtime friend under the bus, he seems to spare him the highrise window fall that is suffered by some regime foes.     

Regime loyalists are closing rank behind the veteran diplomat. “The rumors that Lavrov was rude to Rubio, showed unwillingness to negotiate or caused the summit to be canceled are complete nonsense,” a former Russian diplomat, Boris Bondarev, tells the Moscow Times. Such comments indicate that even if some major chill is blowing from the Kremlin’s top echelon, Mr. Lavrov is not on his way to a Siberia labor camp yet.

Years ago Mr. Lavrov told our Benny Avni that for a few weeks in the summer he goes with high school friends to a dacha in Siberia, where they spend days whitewater rafting. Another Russian diplomat countered that the old buddies, instead, pass the time consuming alcohol inside the dacha. Regardless, if Russia’s most impressive diplomat soon retires to a favored Siberian dacha, Moscow will lose one of its most formidable tribunes.