From a Washington Post story by Amy Wang headlined “John Sullivan departs post as U.S. ambassador to Russia”:
Sullivan’s departure was abrupt, and there had been no earlier indication that his retirement was imminent. He was appointed U.S. ambassador to Russia by President Donald Trump in December 2019 and served for more than 2½ years; President Biden asked him to stay on.
During Sullivan’s tenure, relations between Russia and the United States — and between Russia and most of the Western world — reached their worst point at least since the end of the Cold War. The United States warned for months that Russia was planning to invade its neighbor, but Putin was undeterred and warned of “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” should other countries interfere. The war has also raised fears that Russia could use a nuclear weapon.
On Saturday, Sullivan attended the Moscow funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, whom he described as “a statesman who changed the world through his vision of peaceful coexistence and transformation in his country and the rest of the world.”
“Ambassador Sullivan’s departure is planned and part of a normal diplomatic rotation,” a State Department official said. “He has served a full tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, managing one of the most critical bilateral relationships in the world during unprecedented times. The U.S. will continue to condemn unequivocally the Kremlin’s aggressive war against Ukraine and remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
The White House official noted that Sullivan had served in his post for almost three years, a typical tour length for most other ambassadors to Russia. Sullivan — a seasoned government official — was nominated by Trump but was asked to stay on by Biden given the tense relationship with Russia and the difficulty of moving ambassadorial nominations through the U.S. Senate. It would take many months, and in some cases well over a year, for many of Biden’s nominees to get into place.
Elizabeth Rood, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, will assume duties as chargé d’affaires there until Sullivan’s successor arrives. Last month, Rood was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Turkmenistan and is awaiting Senate confirmation to that post.
Sullivan arrived in Russia in January 2020, a year before the end of Trump’s term in office, during a time when relations between the United States and Russia were already tense.
Though he was involved in many major policy and management decisions, Sullivan was best known to the public as the State Department official who told Marie Yovanovitch, when she was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that she had been yanked home prematurely not because she had done anything wrong but because Trump simply “lost confidence” in her.
Amy Wang is a national politics reporter. She joined The Washington Post in 2016 after seven years with the Arizona Republic.
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