The US is returning diplomats to Ukraine, as President Joe Biden announced his nominee for ambassador to the country that continues to be under invasion by Russia.
Biden’s ambassador pick comes a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an unannounced trip to Kyiv on Sunday said that US diplomats would go back to Ukraine this week. US diplomats left the Kyiv embassy nearly two weeks before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
The US embassy in Kyiv will remain closed, as Russia’s war on Ukraine hit the two-month mark on Sunday.
American diplomats will ‘start with day trips into the Lviv’, the largest city in western Ukraine, and ‘will graduate to potentially other parts of the country and ultimately, to resume presence in Kyiv’, a senior State Department official told .
The White House on Monday morning revealed Biden’s plans to nominate veteran US diplomat Bridget Brink to serve as ambassador to Ukraine.
Brink would fill the post that has been vacant since Trump removed Marie Yovanovitch in 2019. Trump’s then-personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and others had accused Yovanovitch of being involved in conspiracies to stop anti-corruption investigations in Ukraine. That included the Trump administration’s probe into links between Ukrainian authorities and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Brink was appointed to her current role as US Ambassador to the Slovak Republic, by Trump. She previously served as senior advisor and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the US State Department as well as deputy chief of mission at the US embassies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Tbilisi, Georgia.
Originally from Michigan, Brink speaks Russian and started her career in Serbia. She also studied Slovak, Serbian, Georgian and French.
Brink will need a Senate confirmation in order to become US ambassador to Ukraine.
After the first high-level US visit to Kyiv since the war began, Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin crossed the border to Poland, where they pledged ongoing humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
‘Our support for Ukraine going forward will continue… until we see final success,’ Blinken said.
‘The bottom line is this: We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.’
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