Ambassador John Ordway

Ambassador John Ordway

Ambassador John Ordway is a retired Foreign Service Officer. He served as Ambassador to Kazakhstan (2004-2008) and Armenia (2001-2004). After retiring in 2008, he served as chargé d’affaires in Vienna, Sofia, Kathmandu, Prague, and twice in Astana, Kazakhstan. From 2015-2016, he was a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, working on resolving the Donbas conflict. He continued to work on the Donbas conflict as a consultant to the HD Centre in Geneva, Switzerland.

Ambassador Ordway was the U.S. Commissioner to the U.S.-Russian Bilateral Consultative Commission under the New START Treaty from 2010-2019. He also served as the U.S. Commissioner to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty’s Special Verification Commission from 2016 until the Treaty was terminated. Ambassador Ordway graduated from Stanford University and the University of California’s Hastings College of Law before entering the Foreign Service in 1975. He also did a year of graduate study in Soviet and Eastern European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Ambassador Ordway speaks fluent Russian, as well as Czech, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and basic Armenian and Kazakh.