WASHINGTON – The election of President Biden as ambassador to Ukraine will strengthen Washington-Kyiv ties after years without a Senate-confirmed envoy in office, veteran diplomats say, but a return to a wartime US diplomatic presence harbors a new one Risk to the Biden administration.
After months of delays that baffled veteran diplomats, Mr Biden on Monday announced his intention to nominate Bridget Brink, the current US ambassador to Slovakia, for the post. Ms. Brink, a Michigan native, joined the State Department in 1996 and has served in Serbia, Uzbekistan and Georgia.
If confirmed, Ms Brink will become a high-level interlocutor between the Ukrainian government and the Biden government, who have been communicating on an unusually direct basis. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken speaks with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba several times a week, and other senior Biden officials are in regular contact with their equivalents. Although the United States was represented in Kristina Kvien by an able acting ambassador, analysts say there is no replacement for a designated official in the country who can coordinate between multiple departments and agencies.
At the moment, Ms. Brink has no apparent base of operations. The State Department closed its embassy in Kyiv shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, prompting an order for all US diplomats to leave the country. None are known to have returned.
However, after a clandestine visit to Ukraine over the weekend, Mr Blinken told reporters that the United States was beginning to re-establish a diplomatic presence in the country and that he hoped the embassy could reopen “in a couple of weeks”.
The return of American diplomats to the country, even to western and central cities hours from the current front lines, inevitably involves some degree of danger. Although Russian forces have banded together to wage a brutal ground war in southern and eastern Ukraine, they still regularly stage strikes across the country, including a missile attack in Lviv in mid-April that killed eight people.
Starting this week, diplomats who have been working from eastern Poland will make day trips to the relatively peaceful western Ukraine city of Lviv, US officials added, and return to Poland for the night.
“We’re doing it on purpose, we’re doing it carefully, we’re doing it with the safety of our personnel first,” Mr Blinken said.
During his visit to Kyiv, Mr Blinken said he saw people walking the streets, “proof that the battle for Kyiv has been won and that, on the surface at least, there is normal life in Kyiv”.
Ms. Brink would be the first Senate-confirmed ambassador to hold the post since mid-2019, when President Donald J. Trump removed Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who opposed efforts by his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to dig up dirt posing in the country on Mr. Biden’s son Hunter.
In 2019, when she was sworn in as Ambassador of Slovakia, Ms. Brink spoke about the experiences of her grandfather and her husband’s grandparents in Europe during the Second World War. In February, Ms Brink visited the border between Ukraine and Slovakia to witness the arrival of Ukrainian refugees. “My heart goes out to every casualty of this senseless war,” she said, according to a State Department press release.
Congressional officials noted that Mr. Biden had not yet formally submitted his nomination, although months ago the Biden administration had informed the Ukrainian government that Ms. Brink was her choice for the job. It is common practice to seek prior approval from host governments for ambassadorial elections, and Ukraine has been slow to agree for reasons that are unclear.
In a statement Monday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said the Senate “will prioritize its confirmation once it comes before the Senate and will move it as soon as possible.”
Republicans have blocked or delayed dozens of Biden’s diplomatic decisions, but an adviser to a Senate Republican who is active on foreign policy issues said Monday he didn’t expect much opposition to Brink’s nomination.
It is unclear how much protection Ms Brink and other American diplomats will have in Kyiv. American embassies around the world are guarded by US Marine contingents, numbering in the dozens in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. But US officials have declined to say whether troops will accompany the returning diplomats.
Eric S. Rubin, the president of the American Foreign Service Association, called Ms. Brink “a superbly qualified senior Foreign Service official” and said he hoped she could be confirmed quickly. He welcomed Mr Blinken’s plan to reopen the embassy in Kyiv.
Some former diplomats and US officials were concerned that the Biden administration pulled personnel out of Ukraine too quickly earlier this year. US diplomats left the country ahead of some of their overseas counterparts.
In an October speech, Mr Blinken himself warned that the State Department had become too risk-averse, saying diplomats could not work effectively in dangerous areas unless they took risks.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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A bolder American attitude. After a high-level visit to Kyiv, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said the United States wanted Russia to be “weakened” and unable to rebuild its military from its many losses in Ukraine, prompting an increasingly bolder approach by the US reflects Biden administration.
On the floor. Russia rained rockets on five train stations across Ukraine hours after Mr. Austin and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken took the train to the Ukrainian capital. The strikes were part of a broader attack aimed at crippling critical infrastructure in Ukraine.
Diplomatic Changes. President Biden appointed Bridget Brink, the current US ambassador to Slovakia, as ambassador to Ukraine, filling a position that had been vacant for more than a year. The move comes as Mr Blinken said US diplomats will begin returning to the country next week.
“A world without risk is not a world where American diplomacy can do anything,” said Mr. Blinken. “We have to accept risks and manage them wisely.”
Before the downsizing, about 800 to 900 people worked at the US embassy in Kyiv. About 300 of them were Americans, the rest were Ukrainian employees.
William B. Taylor Jr., a veteran retired diplomat who twice served as ambassador to Ukraine, said he spoke with American diplomats and Ukrainian citizens who had worked at the embassy and learned they were keen to return.
“For the diplomats, that’s what they do,” he said. “Most State Department staff deployed abroad understand the risks.”
Mr Taylor said the embassy was unlikely to be the target of a Russian attack and that some US allies had already decided to return gave Washington more impetus.
But even when Russia has no intention of harming the Americans, war zones are always dangerous. During the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, the United States mistakenly attacked the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese state media workers.
The State Department increased protections for diplomats after President Vladimir V. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014 and sent Russian arms and troops to support a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Mr Taylor said that when he first served as ambassador from 2006 to 2009, he was able to travel around without diplomatic security. Upon returning in 2019 following Mr Trump’s decision to remove Ms Yovanovitch from the job, he could not walk into the capital without a security detail.
Like many American embassies, the one in Kyiv is housed in a fortified building outside of the city center. Ukrainians help guard the embassy, and a small group of American marines were stationed there before the war began in February.
US officials have been particularly wary of diplomatic risks following the 2012 attack by militants on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Republicans, including Mike Pompeo, a congressman who later became CIA director and Secretary of State, plagued Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for years with allegations of negligence.
Security will be one of many issues Ms Brink is expected to juggle in Kyiv if confirmed by the Senate. She will probably often visit the Presidential Palace in the heart of Kiev and the seat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is expected to help establish secure communications between Ukrainian and American leaders and is tasked with relaying requests for assistance from Ukrainians to Washington.