Dealing with new US presidents every four to eight years over President Vladimir Putin's quarter-century in power, Russia has been able to count on continuity in its own ranks, drawing on experience that potentially gives the Kremlin an edge as American administrations come and go.
Putin's appointee as Moscow's ambassador to Washington would seem to be a case in point: Aleksandr Darchiyev, 64, has focused largely on North America since Ronald Reagan was the US president.
The appointment comes at what may be a major crossroads as President Donald Trump seeks a rapprochement with Moscow, upending the Biden administration's policy of isolating Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine while also seeking to broker an end to the war.
Russia said the United States had given its blessing to the appointment of Darchiyev after a February 27 meeting of US and Russian officials in Istanbul aimed at resolving disputes over their respective diplomatic missions, which have been scaled down in recent years.
A scholar at the state-run Institute of the USA and Canada in the last decade of the Soviet era, Darchiyev wrote his dissertation on the role of "left-wing liberal forces" in US society and politics in the 1970s and '80s.
He served two stints at the Russian Embassy in Washington in 1997-2002 and 2005-2010 and was ambassador to Canada from 2014 to 2021, as relations between Moscow and the West declined steadily following Russia's seizure of Crimea and fomenting of war in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas.
Moscow Mouthpieces
From 2021 until Putin's March 6 decree appointing him ambassador -- filling a gap left by Anatoly Antonov's departure in October -- Darchiyev had been director of the Foreign Ministry department in charge of ties with the United States and Canada.
Despite the potentially pivotal time at which he is taking up his post, it's far from a given that Darchiyev will have a major effect on how ties between the two nations with the biggest nuclear arsenals will develop. The tone and content of his rhetoric, however, could hold clues to what Moscow wants the West and the world to think about Russia's attitude toward the United States.
Since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, diplomats from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on down have been perhaps more than ever mere mouthpieces, holding little sway and repeating often false or exaggerated Russian narratives about the war, about Ukraine, and about the West.
Darchiyev has certainly done that. He touched on several frequent Kremlin talking points in the space of a single paragraph in an answer with state-run news agency TASS in December 2022, 10 months into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration was "ignoring the new geopolitical realities" and "trying at any price, including using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia and as cannon fodder for the continuation of military action, to preserve the weakening American hegemony," he said. He added that European allies of the United States would be better described as its "satellites."
A Profane Tirade
In separate comments to TASS the same year, he said the United States and Canada had been "whipping up Russophobic hysteria in unison" since 2014. And he told Interfax the United States "will have to reckon with the national interests of Russia, which has its own sphere of influence and responsibility," reiterating Moscow's claim to the right to hold special sway in its part of the world.
While evidence suggests Darchiyev toes the Kremlin line with consistency, an account from a former US ambassador to Moscow indicates his delivery is not always diplomatic -- though undiplomatic language and tone have also become a hallmark for some officials in the Foreign Ministry and other parts of the government in recent years.
In his book Midnight In Moscow, John Sullivan, ambassador to Russia under Biden in 2020-22, wrote that Darchiyev lashed out at him 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, according to Reuters.
