President Joe Biden has tapped a top envoy for Ukraine as his administration’s diplomatic presence returns to the capital of Kyiv two months into the Russian war.
Bridget Brink, a career senior foreign service member and the ambassador to Slovakia appointed by former President Donald Trump, is Biden’s pick for the post as Russia escalates its attacks on Ukraine’s east, according to the White House. The Senate confirmed her for the latter via voice vote in 2019.
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Michigan-born Brink was a senior adviser and a deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. She was also deputy chief of mission at Georgia and Uzbekistan’s U.S. embassies, as well as the National Security Council’s Aegean and South Caucasus director and the State Department’s southern European affairs deputy director.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked last week about Biden’s Ukraine ambassador vacancy but told reporters she did not “have any update on that at this point from here.” The role has remained unfilled by a permanent official since Marie Yovanovitch was recalled in May 2019.
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Biden’s nomination of Brink coincides with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s high-level meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv over the weekend.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said at a press conference in Poland after the trip. “We want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
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Blinken added, “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.”
