Before the speech, the soft-spoken Russian envoy and other foreign ambassadors mingled at a backstage reception also attended by Trump and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to an account written by one of the event’s hosts. Jeff Sessions recuses himself from Russia inquiry amid calls for resignation Read more 
 
 Kislyak’s conversations with the former national security adviser Michael Flynn led to Flynn being forced to quit on 13 February for giving a misleading account to the vice-president, Mike Pence, about his contacts with the ambassador. Sessions recused himself Thursday from investigations involving Russian hacking and other interference in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf after reports that he failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian envoy last July and September, when he was a Trump campaign adviser. After some initial small talk, Sessions said, “somehow the subject of Ukraine came up.” He added that the conversation turned “testy” after Kislyak seemed to portray the conflict there as Ukraine’s fault. Steven Pifer, a former US state department official who is now director of the arms control and non-proliferation initiative at the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington, recalled: “He was working to enhance US-Soviet relations and trying to make progress on arms control. After a stint as Russia’s ambassador to Belgium and to the NATO alliance, Kislyak was named ambassador to Washington by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, assuming his post in July 2008. In a rare press conference last year, Kislyak said: “We were able to end the cold war, but most probably we weren’t able to build post-cold war peace.” 
 
 Some US reports allege that Kislyak is a top recruiter for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, a claim that Moscow dismisses as American paranoia.
– As Attorney General Jeff Sessions remains mired in controversy about his contact with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, more info is emerging about the man NBC News refers to as "the shadowy apparatchik at the center of Trump's Russia crisis." Kislyak, who has held his post since 2008, was the same Russian official who spoke with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—leading to the latter's resignation—and the same one at least two other Trump advisers have admitted to chatting with, per USA Today. More on the 66-year-old Kislyak, who NBC notes has kept a "remarkably low profile" in more than 40 years of service to his country: The Washington Post calls him "quiet, careful, rumpled and portly," and says he "shows up everywhere and tries to talk to everyone." He is not, however, thought to be especially close to Vladimir Putin. Kislyak was even in attendance on Tuesday at President Trump's address to Congress, per the Guardian. Its profile notes that he trained as an engineer and first worked as an envoy in the 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev. The AP tries to reconcile Kislyak's new reputation as the "Kevin Bacon of the Trump White House's Russia imbroglio" with his old one as an under-the-radar diplomat who would be the last person observers would think was involved in controversy. Politico offers a look at "Washington's most dangerous diplomat," noting that Kislyak was front and center at a Trump foreign policy speech last April in which Trump called for an easing of US-Russia relations. And in November, Kislyak accused America of carrying out a "huge propaganda campaign against Russia." A story at CNN takes a look at another accusation often thrown Kislyak's way by US intelligence officials: that he's a Russian spy who tries to recruit others. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, per ABC News, which cites ex-US ambassadors and analysts who take issue with the espionage claims. "If he's a spy, then all ambassadors are spies," one former US diplomat says. One thing he's exceptional at: networking, says the New York Times, revealing details of "over-the-top" dinners he likes to throw for guests at his Beaux Arts mansion in Washington and his ability to entertain, but "always with a political objective," per a former US ambassador to Russia.