For many ambassadors who work on their country's behalf in Washington, D. C., the swirl of high society is the key to America's capital city—it's where friendships form, bonds strengthen, and deals get made. The UAE ambassador holds lavish dinners for friends and government officials, and the wife of the Kuwaiti ambassador is the doyenne of a well-connected crowd of female power brokers. The British ambassador's massive residence, situated on Massachusetts Avenue next door to the vice-president's mansion, is the setting of some of the city's swankiest parties. Meanwhile, the French ambassador—whose compound in the Kalorama neighborhood is a couple blocks from the new homes of both Barack Obama and Ivanka Trump—for years has hosted the tony after-party for the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, a coveted invite that has made the ambassador's social secretary a power unto herself.

The Russian embassy, for decades a hostile outpost in the heart of its enemy's capital, had long been absent from such festivities. But on a warm May evening in 2010, Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, hosted a black-tie benefit for the Washington National Opera. Though Kislyak, whose well-tailored suits struggle to contain his substantial girth, had been ambassador for nearly two years, many saw the benefit as his coming-out party in Washington. The ostentatious event—half Narnia, half Eyes Wide Shut—took construction crews two weeks to prepare and cost more than half a million dollars, a tab picked up by opera benefactor Susan Lehrman. The result was an unsubtle reminder of Russia's erstwhile imperial glory.

In 2010, Kislyak hosted an opera benefit that many saw as his unofficial coming-out party. Tony Brown/imijphoto.com

Walking up the drive from Wisconsin Avenue, guests saw eight-story-tall images of Saint Basil's Cathedral and the Hermitage projected onto the embassy. Inside the building—itself a hulking throwback to the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power—an entryway had been remade into a winter wonderland, with snowflake-like crystals dangling from tree branches and fog machines giving the impression of chilly air throughout.

Upstairs, four themed rooms commemorated the achievements of Russian history and culture. In one room, dedicated to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, partygoers delighted in three hundred full-size edible Fabergé eggs, which had been designed by Sylvia Weinstock, one of the world's most famous cake makers. In an adjacent room, eight-foot-tall, fifteen-hundred-pound ice sculptures anchored an arrangement honoring Tsar Peter I, the father of the Russian navy. They were surrounded by seafood, chilled pepper vodka, and a seemingly endless supply of Caspian Sea caviar. Displays celebrated the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, while baton twirlers and artists from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky opera companies entertained more than six hundred black-tie guests, including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Senators Patrick Leahy and Bob Bennett.

At the time, Washington was still climbing out of the financial crisis, and the city hadn't seen anything like the party in years. As the guests sipped hot Russian tea and waited for valets to return their cars at the end of the night, they couldn't help thinking that a new page had been turned. Maybe this Kislyak guy, who'd sent VIPs home with recordings of one of his favorite operas, Mikhail Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, was a different breed of Russian diplomat. Perhaps the Obama administration's "Russian reset"—a much-vaunted attempt to improve relations between the onetime adversaries—was going to work.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, Dec. 2015 Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo AP

That hope didn't last long. By 2011, the destabilizations of the Arab Spring had begun to concern Russia's one true political power, Vladimir Putin. When corruption in Russia's parliamentary elections that December led to protests in the streets, Putin cracked down, causing a chill in U.S.–Russia relations. In 2014, just weeks after the Sochi Olympics, Russian troops marched into continental Europe, seizing the Crimean Peninsula and launching a war in Ukraine, Kislyak's native land. Tensions between the U. S. and Russia escalated steadily until last year, when a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign meant to undermine Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump pushed the relationship to a crisis point.

The hacking effort was likely the most successful Russian intelligence operation in decades, but it appears to have claimed Kislyak as collateral damage. After nearly a decade as Russia's ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, arguably his country's most critical foreign emissary, the sixty-six-year-old is now a pariah in Washington. Kislyak's contacts with the Trump campaign have been scrutinized by the FBI, Congress, and the press, while top Republicans and Democrats have taken sometimes extravagant measures to prove their distance from the person whom Alexandra Petri, the chief wag at The Washington Post, has called "the least memorable man in the world."

Though Trump and his associates have repeatedly denied colluding with Russia, the circumstantial evidence of uncommonly close contact appears damning. In April of last year, at the Mayflower hotel in Washington, Kislyak was backstage with Trump before the candidate gave a speech that had been shaped in part by Richard Burt, Putin's oil lobbyist in D. C. Three months later, Senator Jeff Sessions—now Trump's attorney general—spoke with Kislyak on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention. So did a pair of Trump advisors, Carter Page and J. D. Gordon, the latter of whom advocated for the party to adopt a more pro-Russia platform on Ukraine. Two days after Sessions and Kislyak met, WikiLeaks published its first batch of emails stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee.

In September, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, publicly suggested Russia might be actively meddling in the election. But even this announcement did not check the Trump campaign's apparent Russophilia: The next day, Sessions met again with Kislyak, and Mike Pence, Trump's running mate, told CNN that Putin was a better leader than Barack Obama.

Jared Kushner NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images Getty Images

The suspicious contacts continued after the election, most notably in a series of December phone calls between Kislyak and Michael Flynn, the retired general whom Trump had selected as his national-security advisor. Those calls, intercepted by U. S. intelligence officials, followed sweeping sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed in response to the hacking campaign. The existence of the conversations was leaked to the press after Putin, out of character, announced that he wouldn't meet the U.S. actions with further escalation. (In February, when it became clear that Flynn had not told Pence the truth about the calls, Flynn resigned as national-security advisor.)

In December, Kislyak also met with Jared Kushner at Trump Tower, and later he arranged a meeting between Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, a Putin ally and a graduate of Russia's intelligence academy. Gorkov now heads Russia's development bank, which has been sanctioned by the U. S. government since 2014 and is itself an occasional overseas front for spies.

Kislyak's repeated encounters with the Trump campaign have led the press to characterize him as a modern-day Rasputin, the man who connects every thread of an eleven-dimensional Russian conspiracy. Yet this portrait baffles the U.S. diplomats who have worked with the ambassador for the better part of forty years. Sure, the man they know as Sergey has been a fierce advocate for his country's place in the world, someone who longs to see Russia reclaim its superpower status. But many of those familiar with Russian intelligence efforts in this country have a hard time believing that Kislyak was an active spy. If it turns out that he really was the man in the middle of a grand conspiracy, they say, that fact alone will almost certainly prove that the relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign was more improvised than engineered.

Not surprisingly, Kislyak professes to be puzzled by complaints about his contacts with the Trump campaign. Last November, he gave a speech at Stanford University that was hosted by his former counterpart, Michael McFaul, the U. S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. Kislyak told a packed auditorium that he didn't understand why everyone was so worked up. After all, just days before the election, he'd run into McFaul in the driveway of the White House—was that suspicious, too? "Did I commit anything wrong?" he wondered out loud. That question—the subject of several federal and congressional investigations—now looms over the nation's capital.

Red Square with illuminated Kremlin Wall. Moscow, Russia. Alamy

For most diplomats from around the globe, a posting to Washington as ambassador marks the pinnacle of a long career, but Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak's arrival in the capital was in some ways bittersweet. Though he was only the fourth ambassador posted to the U. S. since the fall of the Soviet Union, his appointment in September 2008 went almost unnoticed, buried as it was in the midst of ominous headlines about the financial crisis. He presented his credentials to George W. Bush the day after the government stepped in to avert the bankruptcy of insurance giant AIG.

Kislyak wasn't a surprising choice for the post, but he is an atypical Russian diplomat. Though many of his colleagues in the foreign service attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Kislyak, recognized early on for his powerful intellect, trained as a nuclear scientist at the prestigious National Research Nuclear University. In 1977, when he was not yet thirty years old, he joined the foreign ministry as part of an effort by Andrei Gromyko, the legendary diplomat who held sway over Soviet foreign affairs for more than half of the cold war, to bring more experts to the front lines of arms-control negotiations. According to E. Wayne Merry, a longtime U. S. diplomat who worked opposite Kislyak for decades, "That's like being recruited into the State Department by Henry Kissinger."

Four years after joining the foreign ministry, Kislyak was dispatched to the UN Mission in New York, where he weathered one of the darkest chapters of the cold war. Forgotten now, the early 1980s saw a real possibility of war between the two superpowers, including a 1983 NATO exercise, code-named Able Archer, that nearly launched a nuclear conflict by accident. "When I came here in 1981, it was the peak of the cold war," Kislyak recalled in New York years later. "The relations between the Soviet Union at the time and the United States were very difficult, very intense, and very complex."

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Kislyak faced an important career choice: He was 100 percent Ukrainian, and by 1991 many of his Soviet colleagues were returning to help found the newly independent Ukraine. Kislyak, though, remained with Russia. "He fundamentally believes that Ukraine and Russia are one people," Merry says. "I don't think Sergey really believes in an independent Ukraine."

To ward off any suspicion of split loyalties, Kislyak had to prove himself more Russian than a tsar. During the 1990s, he became part of a small and elite group of Russian diplomats who helped build the new nation. Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister from 1991 to 1996, says that Kislyak's talents were obvious. "I promoted him to my deputy because he's a gifted diplomat and a knowledgeable, smart guy," Kozyrev told me. "He's one of the best in the trade." Kislyak, he says, along with Sergey Lavrov, Russia's current foreign minister, and Vitaly Churkin, the recently deceased former ambassador to the UN, "were top-minded people, looking for cooperation with the United States. We departed from the Soviet creed."

To ward off any suspicion of split loyalties, Kislyak had to prove himself more Russian than a tsar.

The 1990s are remembered in the United States as a peaceful period that saw a soaring economy and the success of a fuzzy Clintonian liberalism. Yet Kislyak and his countrymen experienced a very different decade, one that inflicted a lasting injury on their national pride. Russia suffered devastating inflation, economic upheaval, and the pillaging of national resources by the first generation of post-Soviet oligarchs, many of whom decamped for mansions in London as soon as their rape of the country's national industries was complete.

As Putin rebuilt an autocratic security state in Russia during the 2000s, Kislyak and his fellow diplomats faced another choice. Kozyrev, who left the Russian government and ended up at a Washington think tank, says he's confused by Kislyak's loyalty to Putin. "It's a tragedy to my mind that these fine guys chose to serve this disgusting regime," he told me. "We believed those ideological clichés of our youth because we knew nothing else then. If you never breathe fresh air and live in a cave, you may think that's normal. But once you've seen the sun, seen the world out there—to come back, that puzzles me." Kozyrev went on, the sorrow evident in his voice: "It hurts my memories and my soul. Those guys were my coworkers and my friends. How do they feel, coming back to the cave, coming back to the dark? I wonder."

Kislyak's office did not respond to multiple interview requests, but in speeches he has described the former Soviet Union as "a wonderful country." An avid hitchhiker during his college years, he has spoken fondly of trips he took to explore the far corners of his country's empire. "I could move anywhere, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Belarus," he told a group of college students in 2014, a few months after the invasion of Crimea. "It didn't matter who I was; we all were one country. We all spoke the same language; we were all friendly."

This nostalgia for Russia's former glory is common within the country's senior diplomatic ranks, which are still largely populated by those who came of age under communism. That generation—with Putin, the former KGB officer, at its head—continues to see the United States as a hypocritical global adversary, one that disrespected Russia during the 1990s and wants to see the country's current leadership deposed. Kislyak has complained vociferously over the years about how the U. S. builds international systems and alliances at Russia's expense. "We do not want business as usual where Russian interests are not taken into account," he has said.

As Kislyak sees it, "Russia also is exceptional, like many other countries—the difference being we are not trying to impose our exceptionalism on you."

Kislyak is also quick to needle America's grand claims of righteousness. "He's very clear pointing out when our deeds don't match our words," says Sarah Sweedler, who helps organize an annual Russia–U.S. dialogue in which Kislyak has been a regular participant. He particularly takes issue with the idea that the United States' values are more benevolent than those of other nations. He scoffs, for instance, at the American habit of declaring its president "the leader of the free world." As Kislyak sees it, "Russia also is exceptional, like many other countries—the difference being we are not trying to impose our exceptionalism on you." Americans, he has said, "believe that the United States has the right to exert leadership in everything and everywhere."

At a dinner with foreign-policy experts early in Kislyak's tenure, a heated discussion arose about Russia's place in the world. Pressed about the wounded Russian psyche, he let loose with an unexpectedly blunt assessment. "It's because we lost," Kislyak thundered. The second half of the thought went unsaid: Would it kill the United States to be a bit more gracious and understanding, to give Russia a bit more room to be itself on the world stage?

During his years at the UN, Vitaly Churkin was well known for making tactical concessions behind closed doors. Kislyak, by contrast, while unfailingly gracious, has a reputation for hardheadedness. Subtlety is not one of his strengths. According to a former senior U. S. diplomat, Kislyak is "stubbornly doctrinaire, even in private. He doesn't give an inch, which is almost unique among Russian diplomats of his rank." At his first public appearance as ambassador, an October 2008 speech at a reception in Washington, Kislyak harangued the audience about the justice of Russia's invasion of Georgia earlier that year.

Obama with Kislyak @RusEmbUSA

And yet as stubborn as he could be, Kislyak was able to take advantage of Obama's hope for a reset to produce some early diplomatic successes. He was instrumental in negotiating the New START Treaty, which was signed in 2010 and lowered the limits on both countries' deployed nuclear arsenals by 30 percent. He also helped forge an agreement that allowed the U. S. military to transport soldiers and supplies bound for Afghanistan through Russian airspace.

But Kislyak never attained the high-level access—regular face-time with Cabinet members and even the president—available to Washington's most successful emissaries. His isolation was partly the result of his personality, which made it hard for him to build strong relationships with American officials. "He's inflexible to a fault," says the former senior U. S. diplomat. "He's not as effective, because he can't get people [who are] dug in to see Russia differently."

Kislyak's isolation was also by American design, a response to the frustrations McFaul experienced in Moscow. Evelyn Farkas, Obama's top Russia policy hand at the Pentagon, recalls the White House arguing that "it wasn't fair that Kislyak was getting access while Mike wasn't." As a result, Kislyak was not especially familiar to Secretary of State John Kerry; he normally worked through Kerry's staff or through the National Security Council. "The reset wasn't a failure," says the former senior U. S. diplomat. "It just didn't last. It never does, no matter what you call it—détente, glasnost, reset."

In speeches, Kislyak has rejected the idea that the U. S. and Russia are drifting back into a cold war. But according to McFaul, the Russian government sees the world as a zero-sum game in which it must play its cards as aggressively as possible. This attitude is driven, in part, by a fear that without a strenuous effort Russia will not maintain its seat at the table for long. The sustained low price of oil has devastated the country's economy; its population is aging; and life expectancy lags behind the developed world's. Teenage boys in Haiti have a longer life expectancy than their Russian counterparts, and nearly a quarter of all Russian men die before fifty-five, many from alcohol-related causes. If not for its nuclear arsenal, the country would have been reduced to a second-tier power already. That arsenal, combined with a "hybrid warfare" doctrine that mixes cyber, disinformation, and special-forces efforts to destabilize Russia's neighbors, means that Europe can't afford to ignore Putin's activities. But the economic problems at home appear to be taking a toll even on Kislyak's entertainment budget in Washington. Forget Fabergé-egg cakes: At one recent event, Politico reported, guests were served Costco-brand vodka, hardly a traditional Russian staple.

Within the Russian embassy, Kislyak is known as a relentless slave driver. "It exacts a real toll on the staff," says the former senior U. S. diplomat, who notes that Kislyak's underlings sometimes grumble about their boss to their American counterparts, generally a Washington no-no.

Yet inside the Russian government, which measures Kislyak's performance by the quality of the reporting and analysis he sends home, he is seen as keeping up the exacting standards established by his predecessor, Yuri Ushakov. Kislyak begins each morning reading a collection of news clips that his staff has woken up early to gather. "We have a saying: What is the difference between a pessimist and an optimist? A pessimist is a well-informed optimist," he explained in one speech. "I'm an optimist, well-informed."

On his way to an event at the University of Virginia, in the fall of 2014, Kislyak spent the car ride across campus peppering Larry Sabato—a professor and one of the nation's most quoted political sages—with questions about the looming midterm elections. "He was very interested in the details," Sabato recalls. "I was surprised that he was that well-informed on individual races."

Those who have worked with Kislyak in Washington say that he's deeply detail-oriented, as befits his background in arms negotiations, where details and nuance matter. Steven Pifer, a veteran diplomat, worked alongside Kislyak, who was then a deputy foreign minister, to help shape joint statements between Bush and Putin in the early 2000s. "He really seemed to relish the wordsmithing. I was surprised someone at his level didn't pass it off to a deputy," Pifer says. "He's got excellent English." (The Russians' language skills, Pifer notes, "are, I'm embarrassed to say, much stronger than ours.")

For most of his tenure, Kislyak has appeared only rarely at public events: a night with a cellist at his embassy, say, or a gala with Wynton Marsalis and Igor Butman, or a celebration at his residence for the Choral Arts Society, during which he told one guest that he owns more than three hundred choral requiems. He also hosts regular movie nights at the embassy's theater, showing big-budget Russian films that venerate Russia's successes during World War II.

Kislyak has a talented chef at his official residence, a grand Beaux Arts mansion near the White House that was once considered the most expensive private building in the capital. Though he tends to eschew Washington social life, he likes to host intimate meals for people who work on Russian issues, usually—and atypically for D.C.—without other embassy staffers present. The events begin with aperitifs in the grand reception rooms, decorated with paintings of Russia's historical triumphs, and then proceed through lavish multicourse meals, with Kislyak offering Ukrainian pepper vodka as a reminder of his homeland. "You don't go away hungry," Pifer recalls.

Though he tends to eschew Washington social life, he likes to host intimate meals for people who work on Russian issues.

And while Kislyak has few true social friends in Washington, he developed a close relationship with John Beyrle, a career American foreign-service officer who served as his counterpart in Moscow during the first four years of the Obama administration. They bonded in part over Beyrle's fascination with vulgar Russian jokes and obscure idioms. Kislyak is quick-witted and funny in his own right, and he would roar with laughter whenever he heard Beyrle's latest example.

Soon after he became ambassador, Kislyak came to prefer activities—speaking to student groups, local chapters of professional organizations, and other interested parties—that took him far outside Washington. "Talking to people. Yup, I love it," he said in one speech. "I love the way Americans communicate. People are honest, very easygoing, sometimes very thoughtful."

Fort Ross, a thirty-four-hundred-acre California state park that marks the site of the southernmost Russian settlement in North America, may very well be his favorite place in the country. The park features a fort that dates back to 1812, when Alaska and much of the West Coast of North America was controlled by Russian fur traders. When budget cuts threatened to shutter the fort, Kislyak stepped in and successfully implored Russian businesses to save it.

Kislyak visits Fort Ross regularly. An avid photographer, he sometimes wakes up early to prowl the grounds alone, camera in hand. But the fort also represents a larger theme of Kislyak's personality and his professional work: the desire for his homeland to once again be a powerful, respected force in the world, a return to the days when St. Petersburg was a center of art and culture in Europe and Russia's territory extended even to California.

Kislyak's official residence is only four blocks from Donald Trump's front door on the North Portico of the White House, just a seven-minute walk up Sixteenth Street. That physical proximity deeply worried the U. S. military during the cold war, when the building served as the Soviet Union's embassy. "You know, they have an atom bomb on the third floor of the embassy," John F. Kennedy confided to journalist Hugh Sidey one night over dinner early in his administration.

The atomic bomb in the attic remains an unproven rumor, but Russia's campaign of "active measures" against the United States has turned Kislyak himself radioactive, at least politically. Cartoons in Russia depict Kremlin leaders and generals fleeing at the sight of him. In the U. S., David Axelrod, a former Obama aide, joked on Twitter, " 'Kislyak' turns out to be a Russian word for 'I forgot.' " Kislyak has tried to laugh off the controversy, but it's taken a personal toll. "He's a guy who prefers to work the behind-the-scenes," Beyrle says.

Last December, in response to Russia's election interference, the U. S. closed Russian diplomatic compounds in New York and Maryland. EPA/Shawn Thew

Despite reports from CNN and other outlets that Kislyak is a "spymaster," few of those who know him or work closely with the Russian government believe that he's an active intelligence officer. "That's rubbish," one former senior Western intelligence source says. "That's not how old-school Soviet diplomats work. They don't run agents." Merry, the longtime diplomat, told me that Kislyak's nuclear training and laser focus on arms control would be unusual on a Russian spy's résumé. "The notion that Sergey was KGB was inconsistent with what we know about his day job," he says. Kozyrev, the former foreign minister, told me that he would be "very surprised" if Kislyak were working for the intelligence service. "It might be counterproductive to mix those two. It's different jobs, different tools. It's hypothetically possible, but it's not the best practice."

None of which is to say Kislyak didn't know about the intelligence operations directed against the U. S. election. Though Russian ambassadors are typically less empowered than their American counterparts, who generally sign off on every intelligence agent, officer, and operation in the country of their posting, Kislyak's connections mean that he is unusually wired into the Kremlin. He is close to Ushakov, his predecessor, who today serves as Putin's top foreign-policy advisor. While it's possible that Kislyak was not asked to okay the election campaign, he certainly would have known about it. "Nothing is going to surprise Sergey," says the former senior U. S. diplomat.

The unfolding scandal of Kislyak's contacts with Trump aides, alongside the unanswered questions about Russia's active interference with the election itself, has brought into the open a shadowy world of espionage and counterintelligence. Since the early days of the cold war, Russian diplomats in the U. S. have lived under a tight blanket of surveillance, much as American diplomats have in Moscow. It is well known in Washington that Russian officials' calls are monitored by U. S. intelligence, which makes it even stranger that Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, appears to have been caught unawares in December. What's more, the FBI—which is responsible for domestic counterintelligence efforts—keeps a close eye on the Russian missions and uses mobile teams to track suspected Russian intelligence officers as they move about the city. That surveillance explains why most Russian diplomats in Washington live inside the 12.5-acre compound that the Soviet Union built atop D. C.'s Mount Alto in the 1970s.

Anna Chapman Mikhail Korolev

During Kislyak's tenure, Russian intelligence has suffered at least two embarrassing setbacks in the U.S. The first was the arrest in the summer of 2010 of ten "sleeper" agents—the inspiration for the FX series The Americans—who worked with Russia's foreign intelligence service. The agents, including a redheaded bombshell named Anna Chapman, had been living under "deep cover" for years, holding down mundane jobs up and down the East Coast. The second incident was the 2015 arrest of Evgeny Buryakov, a Russian intelligence officer who lived under so-called "nonofficial cover" while working on Wall Street for the same development bank whose leader met with Jared Kushner soon after the election.

Russia has also made life unpleasant for U. S. diplomats in Moscow, especially after McFaul was appointed U. S. ambassador in 2012, just as Putin returned to the presidency. McFaul, who was seen as allied with opposition groups, was harassed by government-sponsored protesters; his children were followed by Russian intelligence officers; and his diplomats were regularly hassled by traffic police. Americans' car tires were slashed and a military attaché discovered that his home had been broken into and his dog had been killed. According to State Department sources, the harassment of Russian nationals employed by the U. S. embassy has been particularly egregious. "They really tried to make our embassy there ineffective," says Andrew Weiss, who works at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.

According to U. S. intelligence sources, the anti-Clinton hacking and leaking campaign last year was part of a larger shift in Russian operations from the real world to the digital realm. Just as criminals have learned how to use the Internet to carry out sophisticated financial crimes without risking physical arrest, so too have spy agencies come to understand the benefits of cyber operations from afar.

Putin's weak hand at home also contributed to his distrust of Hillary Clinton. After the gruesome death of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in October 2011, Clinton quipped, "We came, we saw, he died." Weeks later, Putin met privately with Western visitors, academics, and former government officials as part of the Valdai Discussion Club, Russia's attempt to compete with the Davos World Economic Forum. Over a four-hour dinner, Putin expressed horror at what had befallen Qaddafi. His death, Putin said, was a "disgusting affair."

That incident, and Clinton's unrelenting criticism of Putin ever since, mean that the Russian government would have almost certainly opposed her no matter her opponent. But Donald Trump was an outright boon to Russia. At his speech at the Mayflower hotel, with Kislyak sitting front and center in the audience, Trump announced how excited he was to improve relations with Putin. "I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia—from a position of strength only—is possible, absolutely possible," Trump said. "Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."

In and of themselves, the regular contacts between Russian officials like Kislyak and Trump's inner circle are not suspicious, say those familiar with diplomatic life in Washington. After all, as Kozyrev says, "I would expect the ambassador of any country to meet with as wide a circle of people as possible, including ordinary people, but of course the leaders of the legislative and executive branch."

Jeff Sessions met Kislyak on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention last summer. AP Photo/Steve Helber

Less easily explicable is the nature of the interactions between Kislyak and people such as Jeff Sessions, who had been a Senate backbencher for years. Whereas many ambassadors directly work on Capitol Hill, Russia has long shied from engaging directly with members of Congress, and Kislyak, for most of his time in Washington, has had little record of meeting with senators or representatives.

Kozyrev says it's troubling that Sessions does not seem to have pushed Kislyak to stop Russia's anti-Clinton efforts, even after a top U. S. intelligence official publicly suggested that Russia might be attacking the election. "That silence speaks larger than words," he says, especially coming from a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The security committee—you've got a leading member just ignoring it—that means 'green light.' That's not collusion, but at least it signals 'No problem, go on as long as it serves our political interest.' That's what puzzles me," Kozyrev says. "I was an elected representative in the Duma. That's the first thing anyone in foreign relations would tell an American ambassador if Russia was under attack: 'Hey guys, forget it. You're playing with fire.' "

Sessions, who declined to comment for this article, has said that he does not "recall any specific political discussions" with Kislyak. The ambassador, meanwhile, never one to freelance, has vehemently denied that Russia meddled in the presidential election. "We do not interfere into internal affairs of the United States," he said last October. "Not by electronic or other means." A pile of evidence suggests otherwise, however, and the deeper investigators get, the broader are the questions being raised about links between Russia's tampering and its ties to those around Trump. And while it's true that it would be a bizarre departure from ordinary tradecraft for Russia's official representative in Washington to be central to a covert plot involving a presidential campaign, Kislyak's entanglement may indicate the extent to which the Russian campaign was managed on the fly. "Were the Russians trying to mess around in the election? Absolutely," Beyrle says. "Did they start out trying to get Trump elected? No. They had no idea how far they could get with this."

Sometime soon, likely later this year, Kislyak will wrap up his post, ending nearly a decade in Washington. Though he's long coveted the job of Russian ambassador in Paris—far from what he sees as the cultural wasteland of America's capital—he might be too compromised now for such a plum job. Additionally, the unexpected death of Churkin, the former UN ambassador, has scrambled the future of the Russian diplomatic corps, leaving open the possibility that Kislyak will take a UN post himself. But wherever he ends up, the larger open question is how much blame he will face, here or back home, for the election-interference campaign.

"They didn't expect this to blow up on them in the way that it had," Jon Finer, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, says of the Russians. "They didn't bargain for the exposure and incredibly intense focus this has generated." Russia, apparently, didn't bargain on a Trump victory, either. Last year, Anatoly Antonov, a notorious hardliner, was floated in the Russian media as Kislyak's successor. Antonov was well-primed to deal with an adversarial Clinton White House but not the person you'd pick to maintain relations with a friendly, possibly compromised Trump administration.

Putin with Kislyak Mihail Metzel/POOL/Sputnik

"If Kislyak was to be the fall guy, it'll be because someone more powerful decides it," Merry says. "Someone is going to take it in the neck." That metaphor may prove too literally true: An odd confluence of deaths has hit the Russian diplomatic corps in the months since the election, including a senior diplomat in New York who died mysteriously inside the consulate on Election Day. Meanwhile, Putin critics and opponents across the globe have faced their own onslaught: They have been beaten to death (an investigative journalist); poisoned (opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived); shot (a former Russian member of parliament in Ukraine); found dead in a car (ex–KGB chief Oleg Erovinkin, believed to have been a source for the dossier on Trump compiled by onetime MI6 operative Christopher Steele); and jailed (Alexei Navalny, in Moscow after anti-corruption protests).

It's nearly impossible to separate the truth about these incidents from the fiction—let alone to begin to figure out what connections may lie among them. "It's a surreal time in the Russia field," Andrew Weiss says. "Every day, there's a two-standard-deviation event."

But one thing does seem clear: Those who watch Russia closely fear this is just the beginning of a new and active chapter in a long-simmering conflict. FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers told the House Intelligence Committee in March that they're confident Russia will return to meddle in the 2018 and 2020 elections, especially now that it understands how effective such efforts can be; intelligence agencies have warned about similar campaigns to influence the French and German elections this year.

The final twist is that Russia might now find itself in a more isolated, antagonistic position than it would have if Clinton had won. At the very least, it's hard to imagine a member of Congress—or even a semi-ambitious Washington player—risking a meeting with Russia's top diplomat. And the cloud of suspicion over Trump may compel him to prove himself less friendly to Russia than he anticipated last year. His first major foreign-policy action was to attack the Syrian government in early April, a regime supported entirely by Putin. "Trump's ability to do anything reasonable has been weakened by their own activities," Merry says of Russia. "I'm thinking of the number of Russian writers of irony who could write a really good tale out of this."

For his part, Kislyak appears to have recognized that he's likely to leave the U. S.–Russia relationship in the same dark and distrusting state he found it in when he arrived here thirty-five years ago. "I have a feeling sometimes that I'm getting younger, because I lived through all of this in the '80s," he said recently. "I would try to sum it up as significant disappointment for me as a person who was supposed to help to build relations."

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) writes about national security. His most recent book, RAVEN ROCK, about the U.S. government's Doomsday plans, was published this month. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.