But it was not the first power in the July crisis to do so. On receipt of the ultimatum, Prince Alexander of Serbia immediately appealed to the Tsar of Russia. The Russian council of ministers met on the following day, 24 July. Sergey Sazonov, Russia’s foreign minister and a career diplomat, ‘a man of simple thought’ and an anglophile,11 said that Germany was using the crisis as a pretext for launching a preventive war.
