Agaron Asatur

Agaron Nikolayevich Asatur was a Soviet and Russian diplomat who spent almost four decades in the foreign service of the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation. Best known as Russia's ambassador to Mauritius in the 1990s and to the Republic of Macedonia in the early 2000s, he held the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. He died on 5 November 2026, aged 82, and his death was announced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He was born on 27 February 1944 in Yerevan, in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1967 he graduated from the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University. According to his ministry biography he spoke Indonesian, Armenian, English and French, a range of languages that served him throughout his career.

Asatur joined the diplomatic service in 1968. For more than two decades, from 1968 to 1992, he worked in a series of posts in the consular directorate of the Soviet and then Russian foreign ministry, and from 1992 to 1994 he was deputy director of the ministry's Consular Service Department. In September 1994 he was appointed Russia's ambassador to Mauritius, a post he held until May 1999. He then served as a department director at the Russian Ministry for CIS Affairs, and from 2000 to 2002 as deputy director of the foreign ministry department responsible for relations with the regions of Russia, parliament and public organisations.

In February 2002 he was appointed ambassador to the Republic of Macedonia, now North Macedonia, and presented his credentials in March of that year. He remained in Skopje until June 2006. He was awarded the highest diplomatic rank, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, in July 2004, and was recognised as an Honorary Worker of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After retiring in 2007, Asatur stayed close to the diplomatic community through the ministry's veterans' organisations. From 2017 he chaired the audit commission of the Fund of Veterans of the Diplomatic Service. He was married and had two children.

In its notice of his death, the ministry's leadership and its Second European Department said that he had been marked by high professionalism, hard work, a responsible attitude to every task entrusted to him, and warmth towards his colleagues, and that his memory would remain in the hearts of all who knew him. No cause of death was made public.