Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Alexander Darchiev, who served during a rapprochement between the Kremlin and Washington, died suddenly on Thursday, the Russian foreign ministry said. He was 66.
Mr. Darchiev died in Moscow of a “chronic illness,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the ministry, said in a statement published by Tass, the Russian state news agency.
“We have lost an outstanding diplomat, an experienced leader, a kind colleague and a mentor,” the ministry said in its statement. It described Mr. Darchiev as a “distinguished expert on the United States” who had “served in one of the most demanding areas of Russian foreign policy.”
Mr. Darchiev had been in the diplomatic service since 1992, and he was appointed as ambassador to the United States by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in March 2025.
His appointment came as President Trump sought to broker a cease-fire agreement to halt Russia’s war against Ukraine, which began in 2022. Mr. Darchiev’s term coincided with a thaw in relations between the Kremlin and Washington as U.S. policy shifted from staunch support for Ukraine under the Biden administration to pressure on Kyiv to make a deal with Russia.
In February last year, Mr. Darchiev led a Russian delegation meeting with U.S. officials in Istanbul about the operations of the two nations’ diplomatic missions. At the time he was director of the North Atlantic Department, a section of the Russian foreign ministry that oversees relations with Canada, Ireland, Britain and the United States.
“The dialogue on irritants has been ongoing, and certain improvements have been achieved,” Mr. Darchiev said last year in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant in which he discussed frictions between the United States and Russia.
But he said the United States was tying discussions on certain issues, like Russian access to seized diplomatic properties in the United States, “with a settlement in Ukraine that suits its interests,” which he objected to.
Talks on ending the war in Ukraine, which had been stalled for much of this year, resumed this week in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, after a push by the Trump administration that began in September. The discussions are not expected to yield fruit anytime soon.
It is not clear if Mr. Darchiev was involved in those talks.
Mr. Darchiev, who was born in 1960, graduated from Moscow State University in 1983. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Darchiev’s appointment to Washington as ambassador to the United States was not his first stint in the country or the region. He served as Russia’s ambassador to Canada from 2014 to 2020 and worked at the Russian Embassy in the United States from 2005 to 2010, according to a biography on the embassy’s website.
In the intervening years, Mr. Darchiev directed the North America Department and, briefly, the foreign ministry’s North Atlantic department, before serving in what prove to be his final role.
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