Putin, mending ties with US, names veteran diplomat Darchiev as new ambassador

Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Alexander Darchiev, a veteran diplomat known in the past for public denunciations of the West, as ambassador to the US on Thursday to lead a rapprochement that has stunned Ukraine and European countries.

The foreign ministry said last week Washington had given it the green light at a meeting between Russian and US officials in Turkey to appoint Darchiev, who now serves as head of the ministry's North America department.

The six-hour meeting in Istanbul last Thursday, where the delegations worked to try to restore the normal functioning of their embassies after years of tit-for-tat expulsions, was the latest sign of a thaw between the two countries.

President Donald Trump has upended previous policy on the war in Ukraine, opening up bilateral talks with Moscow and pausing military aid to Kyiv after clashing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House last week.

Russia has had no ambassador in Washington since October when the previous envoy Anatoly Antonov left his post.

Darchiev, 64, has served two long spells in Russia's Washington embassy and was ambassador to Canada from 2014 to 2021. Like other senior Russian diplomats, he has been known in recent years for strong public denunciations of the US and the West.

“Apparently, Washington will need time to get used to the fact that its hegemony is in the past and will have to reckon with the national interests of Russia, which has its own sphere of influence and responsibility,” he told Interfax in March 2022.

In a memoir, John J Sullivan, a US ambassador to Russia under then-president Joe Biden, described Darchiev becoming “visibly enraged” during a meeting at the foreign ministry in Moscow over remarks by Biden, who called Putin a war criminal.

“When I finished, he started screaming at me in a profane tirade that I should not come into the ministry with such a belligerent attitude,” Sullivan wrote. He declined further comment on the events when contacted by Reuters and Reuters was not able to reach Darchiev for his side of the story.

Reuters