MOSCOW — “Tim who?”

That was the reaction of the majority of Russians asked about the four-year tenure of Tim Barrow — the career diplomat named this month as the United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the EU — as head of the British embassy in Moscow.

Appointed as Britain’s ambassador to Russia in August 2011, Barrow operated almost entirely behind the scenes, avoiding the harassment and state media vilification suffered by some of his fellow Western diplomats.

But this low-key approach masked some solid diplomatic work, gaining him the respect of his counterparts and high-level Russian officials alike, during a period that included the crises in Ukraine and Syria and a Kremlin crackdown on political dissent.

“He created the impression of a real professional who was able to advocate the positions of his own government, while also striving to find out and understand Russia’s positions,” said Alexei Pushkov, a prominent Russian senator who headed the parliament’s foreign affairs committee during Barrow’s time in Moscow.

“Tim coped quite well with the important task of maintaining contacts between Russia and Britain, despite the near impossibility of agreement on either Syria or Ukraine,” he added.

Tom Fletcher, a former U.K. ambassador to Lebanon who met Barrow in Moscow, told the BBC this month that Barrow was “resilient” in his dealings with the Kremlin. “Tim had a reputation of being bulletproof out there,” he said.

Barrow’s predecessor as British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, was regularly hounded by pro-Kremlin youth activists after attending an opposition conference. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow from 2012-2014, was accused by Russian state television of seeking to orchestrate the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin after hosting opposition activists and Kremlin critics at the embassy in his second day on the job. McFaul was also harassed by state media television crews on the streets of Moscow.

“Brenton and McFaul both got heavily involved in Russia’s domestic politics — areas that an ambassador should not be so active in,” said Pushkov. “Tim Barrow was an advocate of a more classical school of diplomacy. In as much as Barrow engaged in diplomacy, and did not try to influence Russian domestic politics, attitudes to him were somewhat different.”

Unlike McFaul, a non-career diplomat who had a very visible presence on Twitter throughout his time in Moscow, Barrow is invisible on social media. His interviews with Russian media also focused exclusively on such relatively uncontroversial subjects as joint British-Russian military efforts during World War II and London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. He did not respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.

“The Kremlin’s treatment of McFaul set the benchmark for what happened to those that tried to establish a presence,” said a Western diplomat who worked in Russia at the same time, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The times called for a much greater focus on advising our home governments, rather than engaging the Russian government.”

Hard-nosed

Barrow, who also served as Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine in 2006-2008, was initially tasked with implementing an attempted reset in relations with Russia following the row over the murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Shortly after his arrival, Barrow hosted David Cameron’s visit to Moscow, the first by a British prime minister for six years.

“The British government saw Russia largely as a trade opportunity for much of the time he was ambassador,” said Ian Bond, a Russia expert at the Centre for European Reform think tank in London. “[Barrow] is very knowledgeable, very capable and very hard-nosed.”

Despite his best efforts to keep disagreement behind the scenes, plummeting relations between Britain and Russia meant that even Barrow was unable to avoid public censure entirely. In August 2012, he was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s towering Stalin-era headquarters in central Moscow over the stoning of Russia’s embassy in London by anti-war activists opposed to the Kremlin’s military support for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

This was one of a handful of times that Barrow’s name was mentioned by Russian state television. (For comparison, McFaul was mentioned dozens of times by Kremlin-controlled national television channels and remains a near household name in Russia, even two years after his departure from Moscow.)

Barrow also hosted John Major, the former British prime minister, when he flew into Moscow after the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician, at the Kremlin walls in February 2015. Barrow attended Nemtsov’s wake with Major and later joined other Western ambassadors in laying flowers at a makeshift tribute to the Kremlin critic near Red Square.

However, the British embassy made no comment on the most high-profile political murder in post-Soviet Russia, preferring instead to relay Downing Street’s statement.

Indeed, Barrow was so low profile that two respected Russian experts on Moscow’s relations with the West failed to recognize his name when contacted by POLITICO. “What an inconspicuous ambassador!” one exclaimed.

As he heads into high-profile Brexit talks, it’s unlikely that Barrow’s obvious talent for obscurity will enable him to blend quite so successfully into the background in Brussels.

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