When Russian President Vladimir Putin started vilifying the U.S., and state-controlled media took his cue, Michael McFaul was portrayed as one of the American villains. McFaul was the American ambassador to Russia from January 2012 to February of this year. He planned to leave just after the Sochi Olympics, which ended up coinciding with the Ukrainian parliament voting to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office, which led to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
McFaul is a Russian scholar who has returned to his teaching job at Stanford University. He was the architect of the Obama strategy known as "Reset," which meant moving beyond Cold War hostilities and finding areas for mutual cooperation, such as enforcing sanctions against Iran and bringing Russia into the World Trade Organization.
McFaul served as a foreign policy adviser during Obama's first term. He joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, Putin's increasingly authoritarian regime and his experiences as ambassador.