The purpose of the Master’s thesis is to study the features of the relations between the United States and the Russian Federation during the presidency of Barack Obama and explain the reasons which caused the ‘’Reset’’ policy failure. In 2009, the Barack Obama administration announced the formation of a new foreign policy, in which one of the key roles was defusing the difficult situation with the Russian Federation and deepening bilateral cooperation. Nevertheless, as subsequent events have shown, the ‘’reset’’ cannot work effectively and the relations between US and Russia has not only failed to improve, but went back to the Cold War level. The research question is worded as followed: Why did the ‘’Reset’’ policy with Russia turn out to be unsuccessful for the United States? Accordingly, the hypothesis has been formulated in the following way: excessive concessions made to Russia by the Obama Administration under the ‘’Reset’’ policy, namely during the crisis in Syria and Russian-Ukrainian conflict, not only failed to make Russia’s actions more constructive, but also facilitated its more aggressive conduct, which caused the ‘’Reset’’ policy to be unsuccessful. The paper analyzes and explains the reasons to what extent did the U.S concessions policy impact on the failure of the “Reset’’ policy. In order to reach this goal, the research reviews two cases: Syrian Crisis and Russia-Ukraine conflict as examples of the United States’ concession policy with Russia. The paper employs the qualitative research methodology. The Normative Foreign Policy Theory by Natalie Tocci serves as a theoretical framework for the research. The theory defines the features of the formation of the foreign policy and achieved results by the international actor