27 February, 2025. The spin coming out of Moscow that the Trump administration is ‘restoring’ diplomatic contacts with Russia is rubbish. There might be plans to restore their respective embassies to something like the huge numbers they used to contain and function in a less inhibited way – not in principle a bad thing – but they were never closed down. Had this been the case, I think we might have heard about it. Indeed, a new US ambassador to the Russian Federation, Lynne Tracy, was appointed by the Biden administration in early 2023, roughly a year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The fact that this ambassador was also a career diplomat and had been DCM at the Moscow embassy from 2014 to 2017 shows that the Democratic administration remained seized with the importance of diplomacy via resident missions. It did not require the genius now in the White House to come up with this blinding insight. Reuters has an account that is more accurate than some of what has actually been happening.