By Lidia Kelly
(Reuters) -Russia's envoy to the U.S., a Kremlin hard-liner, was returning to Moscow on Saturday, state media reported, with the end of his term coming at a time of the most hostile relations between the two nations in decades.
"Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Ivanovich Antonov is concluding his Washington assignment and heading to Moscow," TASS state news agency cited the foreign ministry as saying.
The Siberia-born Antonov, 69, a career diplomat, was seen as a hawk who was still capable of striking compromises. Head of the Russian mission in Washington since 2017, he said in July his assignment was coming to an end.
There was no mention of who would replace the envoy, considered a military-style negotiator. His stance on Russia's war in Ukraine has shown stalwart support of President Vladimir Putin's actions.
"It is obvious to us that the enemy will be defeated and victory will be Russia's," Antonov said on Saturday in an unrelated post on the Telegram messaging app, commenting on Russian forces capturing Ukraine's mining town of Vuhledar.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a special military operation, accusing Washington and its NATO partners of waging a hybrid war in Ukraine. Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow's aggression is an unprovoked imperialistic attempt to grab land.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet Union and U.S. came close to nuclear war.
Antonov, who served as deputy defence minister during a period which coincided with Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula in 2014, was a subject of European sanctions when Putin named him Russia's envoy to the U.S.
He graduated in 1978 from the main diplomatic training ground of the Soviet Union, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Antonov spent the next three decades climbing through the foreign ministry ranks, according to his biography on the embassy's website.
Before moving to Washington, he was known as a shrewd arms control negotiator who had headed Russian delegations to a number of international and strategic weapons talks.
In an August interview with TASS, Antonov said Russia was ready to consider a pact with Washington on arms control.
"My tactics for conducting negotiations are very simple: you and I need to take a piece of paper and write down what you want and what I want," he said.
"Take the two sheets of paper and try to find something in common there, even if it is minimal, but start from this when solving problems."
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Sandra Maler and David Gregorio)
