OREANDA-NEWS. Former Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Andrei Kelin has been appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin on his appointment was published on the official web portal of legal information on November 5.

Earlier, Alexander Yakovenko was the Ambassador for eight years since 2011. He was fired on August 24, 2019, and went back to his homeland. As a spokesman for the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said, the resignation of the diplomat was not connected with the deterioration in relations between Moscow and London. According to the representative of the Kremlin administration, the departure of the diplomat from the post of head of the diplomatic mission is a normal rotation. A few days later it became known that Yakovenko will take the post of Rector of the Diplomatic Academy of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Russian adviser-envoy Ivan Volodin was appointed chargé d'affaires ad interim Russian Embassy in Great Britain.

Andrei Kelin was born in 1957. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1979. The diplomat worked in the Soviet embassy in the Netherlands, in the embassy of the USSR, and then of the Russian Federation in Belgium, in different departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in permanent missions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He has the diplomatic rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.