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 MOSCOW — The United States ambassador to Russia announced Tuesday that he would resign after the Winter Olympics, set to begin in Sochi this week, ending a stormy two-year tenure during which relations between the two countries were at their lowest ebb since the end of the Cold War. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ambassador Michael A. McFaul, who spearheaded a “reset” in relations between Russia and the United States as a senior adviser to President Obama during the president’s first term, often served as a lightning rod for criticism from Russian officials who accused the State Department of funding opposition politicians and interfering in the country’s internal affairs. 
 
 “After more than five years working in the Obama administration, it is time to go home,” Mr. McFaul wrote in a blog that he updated regularly. He added that he wished to spend more time with his family. 
 
 Mr. McFaul pointed to successes in promoting cooperation on issues including counterterrorism and cybersecurity. 
 
 The blog, along with his Twitter account, were staples of Mr. McFaul’s digital diplomacy, an approach sometimes tainted by gaffes that nonetheless led to surprisingly frank exchanges between Mr. McFaul and ordinary Russians — both supporters and detractors. 
 
 “Farewell, Mikhail!” the Russian Foreign Ministry said, referring to Mr. McFaul, in a curt response to the announcement on Twitter. 
 
 “There’s no political issue here at all whatsoever,” Mr. McFaul told reporters at Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence in Moscow, on Tuesday night. “There is no disenchantment with U.S.-Russian relations or all of those kinds of those things.” 
 
 He is departing months ahead of the next Group of 8 meeting, which will be held this summer in Sochi. He said that there would be a gap before a successor was named and confirmed by the Senate, and that that had been a consideration in his deliberations over leaving now. 
 
 At the same time, Mr. McFaul said the areas where the United States and Russia were working together — including negotiations over Syria and Iran — would continue. “I don’t see my personal departure in any way as a gap in that,” he said. 
 
 As an adviser in the White House, Mr. McFaul helped devise the New Start nuclear arms control treaty, which was widely viewed as the first significant overhaul of nuclear disarmament policy since the late Cold War. In Russia, however, he encountered a country that was willing to assert itself and redefine its relations with the United States. 
 
 He arrived in Moscow during a cycle of protests against President Vladimir V. Putin beginning in late 2011. He was soon hounded by pro-government news media stations for meeting with opposition politicians, leading to a public denial in his first month in Russia that he had been sent to the country to foment revolution. 
 
 The early successes of the reset gave way to Russia’s eviction of the United States Agency for International Development, a law banning adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans and the granting of asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, despite demands that he face prosecution in the United States. 
 
 When Mr. Obama canceled a summit meeting with Mr. Putin in August over tensions related to the Snowden case and the crisis in Syria, the reset in relations seemed to be a shambles, raising questions about how much more Mr. McFaul could expect to accomplish as ambassador. 
 
 Mr. McFaul, who noted in a post on Twitter that his wife and two sons left Russia for California last summer to arrive in time for the new school year, reiterated a desire to reunite with his family. “After 7 months of separation, I simply need to be with my family. A 9,000 km commute just doesn’t work,” he wrote. 
 
 Benjamin J. Rhodes, the director for strategic communications at the National Security Council, said in a statement that Mr. Obama was “deeply grateful” for Mr. McFaul’s tenure as an adviser and ambassador, highlighting the New Start treaty and Mr. McFaul’s engagement with civil society. 
 
 Mr. McFaul said he planned to leave Russia “soon after the Olympics,” where he will serve as part of the American delegation. ||||| Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia, leaves the Foreign Ministry in Moscow in this May 15, 2013, file photo. (Misha Japaridze/AP) 
 
 U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, the architect of President Obama’s effort to reset American relations with Russia, said Tuesday that he will leave his post at the conclusion of the Olympics to return to Stanford University. 
 
 McFaul, who has been ambassador for two years, said he was resigning to rejoin his family, who returned to California last year so that his older son could finish his high school years at home. 
 
 “We tried to make a [5,600-mile] commute work for our family,” he wrote in a blog post. “But after seven months of separation, I simply need to be with my family again.” 
 
 McFaul never wavered in his defense of the “reset” despite the increasingly rocky trail of U.S.-Russian relations in recent years. In a blog post titled “It’s Time, My Friend, It’s Time,” written in Russian and English, which he said would be his last as ambassador, he listed what he argued were the reset’s accomplishments. 
 
 Among them were the New START accord limiting nuclear arms, the opening of the Northern Distribution Network allowing the United States to send supplies to its troops in Afghanistan by way of Russia, cooperation on Iran and North Korea, and Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization — which Washington wanted on the grounds that it requires Russia to commit to international trade rules. 
 
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 Yet all of those accomplishments were completed — or headed toward completion — while McFaul was Obama’s chief national security adviser on Russia, before he came to Moscow as ambassador. 
 
 [Read: How McFaul has gotten his message out] 
 
 McFaul arrived in January 2012, as Vladimir Putin was well on his way to reclaiming the Russian presidency. Putin’s campaign relied heavily on anti-Americanism, and much of that fell on McFaul. 
 
 He acknowledged in his blog post that there have been challenges to manage during his two years here: the expulsion of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the ban on adoptions by Americans, the haven provided to Edward Snowden, a virulent anti-Americanism in the Russian media, and fundamental disagreements over Syria and, most recently, Ukraine. 
 
 The initial accomplishments of the reset in relations, which McFaul put together as a White House aide, had provided no momentum toward a broader warming in ties between Moscow and Washington — and as ambassador he had to work with the consequences. 
 
 The chief factor was the return of Putin to the Kremlin. The Russian president had not forgotten that McFaul once edited a book on Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 — which for Putin was a personal disaster that he blamed on American interference and that he vowed would never be replicated in Russia. 
 
 Before working at the White House, McFaul, 50, was an academic, writing extensively on democracy in this part of the world. That was enough for Putin and other officials to consider McFaul a provocateur. He was greeted with suspicion and even malevolence, as if sent by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to fan the fires of revolution and encourage unwelcome democratic initiatives. 
 
 Not content to slip into the background, he was followed by hostile television crews, who harassed not only him but the people he met with if they happened to be involved with the human rights movement or the political opposition. McFaul pressed on, undeterred, almost invariably good-humored, except for one encounter in which he told a particularly aggressive pack that they represented a “wild” country. 
 
 He did become an indefatigable contributor to Twitter, writing about issues as varied as support for democracy and his broken finger, and he developed a following of 60,000. 
 
 At the White House, Ben Rhodes, the national security spokesman, said Obama was “deeply grateful” for McFaul’s service. 
 
 “Mike has been tireless in advocating for the universal values that America stands for around the world, reaching out to civil society, and recognizing the right of every voice to be heard,” Rhodes said. 
 
 In his blog post, McFaul said he originally had promised his older son that he would be away from his California school for two years, a promise not kept. 
 
 “After five years away, first in Washington and then Moscow,” he wrote, “he wanted to go home for his last years of high school. We all agreed that it was in his best interest to return, and that decision turned out to be the right one. 
 
 “For the immediate future,” he wrote, “my base of operations will be Stanford University. But a part of me — an emotional part, an intellectual part, a spiritual part — will always remain in Russia. That was true before I joined the government. It will remain so forever after.” ||||| The administration’s point man for Syria, Robert Ford, has told friends he is likely to leave the State Department later this year, our colleague Anne Gearan reports. 
 
 On paper, Ford is still the U.S. ambassador to Syria, but his job has been to lead the U.S. policy of supporting the Syrian opposition movement since the embassy in Damascus shut down two years ago this week. Here’s his live broadcast Jan. 28 on Orient TV to the Syrian people from Geneva, where peace talks are taking place. 
 
 Click here to watch the video. 
 
 The first round of talks ended without any visible progress, and with U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi saying so publicly. An effort to build confidence by opening a limited humanitarian route to the besieged city of Homs did not materialize, despite Ford’s back-room efforts. A second round is set to begin next week, so Ford will be back in Geneva. 
 
 A career foreign service officer, fluent Arabic speaker and well-regarded former top official in the Baghdad embassy, Ford was in line to become the next ambassador to Egypt. The nomination died before it was born, however, when officials of the interim military-backed government in Cairo nixed it, according to several people familiar with the unusual decision. 
 
 Ford was an indirect casualty of the coup that deposed the Muslim Brotherhood-backed elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last summer. Although widely liked by many Egyptian officials, Ford’s vocal support for the Syrian opposition movement and close ties to Persian Gulf nations made him suspect to the Egyptian military that has held de facto power since July, current and former U.S. officials said. Egypt’s opposition was first reported by Foreign Policy magazine. 
 
 Ordinarily, career officers named to major posts in friendly capitals have no trouble winning “agreement,” the diplomatic term for the acceptance of one country’s choice for ambassador. But the Egyptian military, which long considered the Muslim Brotherhood movement a political enemy, feared that Ford was too close to Islamist political movements across the Middle East, U.S. and Arab officials said. 
 
 Ford’s nomination had been planned for January, U.S. and other officials said. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because neither Ford nor the White House have spoken publicly about the doomed plan. Instead, the embassy No. 2, deputy chief of mission Marc J. Sievers, was promoted to charge d’affaires Jan. 21. 
 
 “Robert Ford has not been nominated for a new position. Beyond that, we don’t have any comment on personnel,” said Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman. 
 
 Those interested in comparing career foreign service diplomats to mega-bundler ambassador appointees might want to compare Ford’s TV chat with the testimony last month of two Obama White House contributor- nominees to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ||||| MOSCOW (AP) — The U.S. ambassador to Russia has announced that he is stepping down after two turbulent years in Moscow. 
 
 FILE - In this Wednesday, May 15, 2013 file photo the U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul leaves the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Russia. The U.S. ambassador to Russia has announced that he is stepping... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Wednesday, May 15, 2013 file photo the U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul leaves the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Russia. The U.S. ambassador to Russia has announced that he is stepping... (Associated Press) 
 
 Michael McFaul is considered the architect of President Barack Obama's effort to reset relations with Russia. 
 
 McFaul points to many successes in U.S.-Russian relations, including the negotiation of a new strategic arms treaty and cooperation on the NATO-led military campaign in Afghanistan. But his tenure also has brought disappointments in the face of the rising anti-Americanism in Russia that accompanied Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. 
 
 The ambassador announced his departure in a blog post on Tuesday, saying he would leave after the Sochi Winter Olympics. 
 
 A longtime Stanford University professor, McFaul said he would be returning to California. His wife and two sons had returned home last year.
– By the end of the month, the Obama administration will have lost its top diplomats in two of its most important posts. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul both announced their impending resignations today, the AP reports. Here's what you should know about each: Ford Ford is retiring by the end of the month, the State Department confirmed. Ford has been instrumental in the administration's oft-troubled negotiations in Syria, and in attempting to unite its disparate rebel groups. A career diplomat and fluent speaker of Arabic, he was expected to land the Egypt gig, but sources tell the Washington Post that Egypt's rulers have taken the unusual step of nixing that idea. "Robert Ford has not been nominated for a new position. Beyond that, we don't have any comment," a National Security Council spokeswoman said. McFaul McFaul is widely credited as the man behind the effort to "reset" US-Russian relations, and helped design the New Start treaty, the New York Times reports. But relations with Russia have been cratering over the past two years, and Russian media has lambasted him for meeting with opposition politicians. McFaul will be leaving his post "soon after" the Sochi Olympics, he said in a blog post written in both Russian and English. He wrote that he was leaving Russia "reluctantly" but wanted to be closer to his family. "We tried to make a 9,000-kilometer commute work for our family," he said, but "it's time for us to be reunited." He'll return to his longtime gig as a professor at Stanford, the Post reports.