Ivanov was born in 1945 in Moscow to a Russian father and a Georgian mother (Elena Sagirashvili). In 1969 he graduated at the Maurice Thorez Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages (Moscow State Linguistic University). He joined the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1973 and spent a decade in Spain. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1983. In 1991 he became the ambassador in Madrid.

He was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs on September 11, 1998. As Russian foreign minister, Ivanov was an opponent of NATO’s action in Yugoslavia. He was also an opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Ivanov played a key role in mediating a deal between Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and opposition parties during Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003.

Ivanov was succeeded to the post of foreign minister by Sergey Lavrov in 2004, and appointed by President Vladimir Putin to the post of Secretary of the Security Council, followed shortly by the appointment of Sergey Lavrov as foreign minister.

On 9 July 2007 he submitted his resignation. On 18 July, President Putin accepted Ivanov’s resignation and appointed Valentin Sobolev as acting secretary,

In 2011 Ivanov became a member of the advisory council of The Hague Institute for Global Justice and in 2014 worked for The Moscow Times.