Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled by President Trump as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and denigrated by him in the phone call that is now at the center of a whistleblower complaint and potential impeachment proceedings, was born in Canada to parents who fled Nazi and Soviet oppression.
Yovanovitch, 60, is a career official who was twice chosen for ambassadorships by President George W. Bush and once, to Ukraine, by President Barack Obama. Trump said of her on the call: “The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news,” Trump said in their July 25 conversation, according to a transcript released by the White House. “She’s going to go through some things.”
That prompted widespread condemnation from American diplomats. “The threatening tone of this statement is deeply troubling,” the American Academy of Diplomacy said in a statement. “Whatever views the Administration has of Ambassador Yovanovitch’s performance, we call on the Administration to make clear that retaliation for political reasons will not be tolerated.”
Former senior State Department career official Dan Fried told the New York Times: “It’s more than crazy — it’s ugly, it’s threatening. Masha Yovanovitch is known as a straight arrow, disciplined, professional. If you take out Masha Yovanovitch, you send the message to every ambassador that we will not have your back.”
At her confirmation hearing in June 2016, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she had arrived in the U.S. at age three and joined the foreign service in 1986. “My parents’ lives were changed forever by communist and Nazi regimes,” she said. “They survived poverty, war and displacement, and finally arrived in the United States, with me in tow, in search of freedom, opportunity, dignity and accountability. The very values that Ukrainians demanded in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.”
That autobiographical aside hinted at how she would approach her job as the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, as she emphasized the need for rule of law in Ukraine while invoking the history of the Soviet occupation of Ukraine that Kremlin propagandists try to obscure. But Yovanovitch’s tenure in Kyiv was curtailed by a controversy that State Department officials regarded at the time as a disinformation campaign by corrupt Ukrainian officials who played on President Trump’s political interests in order to protect their own careers.
“I think President Trump, in the wake of the Mueller investigation having been concluded — and there not being any accusation of collusion — is now going on the offensive,” Kurt Volker, the State Department’s special representative for the Ukraine crisis, said in May. “That is all domestic political narrative.”
That defense came too late for Yovanovitch, who had returned from Kyiv days earlier after the president and his family echoed attacks on her integrity that were lodged by a Ukrainian prosecutor distrusted by the State Department. And Volker’s views did not deter Trump from attacking Yovanovitch and appearing to praise the prosecutor in the subsequent controversial phone call with Zelensky.
Yovanovitch, who was raised in Connecticut, was appointed U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in the final year of Obama’s presidency. Bush had chosen her as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and Armenia in 2008. Before then, she had been deputy chief of mission in Ukraine from 2001 to 2004.
Trump’s comments were an extraordinary display of animosity, particularly to another head of state, according to prominent former U.S. diplomats.
The president criticized Yovanovitch while urging Zelensky to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and to probe allegations that former Vice President Joe Biden had worked to kill an investigation into a Ukrainian company that had hired his son, Hunter Biden. That exchange reflected Trump’s confidence in allegations raised by then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yurie Lutsenko.
Ukraine’s outgoing prosecutor general had told an American journalist that he had evidence of former Ukrainian officials coordinating with Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Lutsenko had accused Yovanovitch of instructing him not to investigate numerous people, a claim he would eventually retract. Volker, without mentioning Lutsenko by name, panned those allegations as a desperate ploy to develop a political alliance in Washington that would convince Zelensky to keep him in office.
“Other people in Ukraine are trying to use the U.S. domestic politics as a vehicle for their own engagement, either in fighting their domestic enemies inside Ukraine or trying to feel like they’ve got some special relationship with people in the United States,” Volker said at the Carnegie event.
But Lutsenko had already met in private with Giuliani, who hopes to prove that the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2020 engaged in corruption to protect his son. And Volker would subsequently put Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, in contact with the new president. Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian officials have stoked suspicions that Trump’s team is trying to press Ukraine to investigate his political opponents heading into the 2020 election season.
“I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop,” Giuliani said in early May. “And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
It’s a turn of events that Yovanovitch could not have envisioned during her confirmation, which focused on how the U.S. could fortify Ukraine in the midst of a war with Russia, even as Moscow denies invading the former Soviet vassal state. The U.S. diplomat touted the appointment of Lutsenko — whom she praised for his “commit[ment] to reforming” the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office — as a victory for the rule of law.
“Ukraine has made more important progress on reforms in the last two years than it did in its first 23 years of independence,” she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her prepared testimony. “These reform achievements are all the more impressive given that they have come in the face of Russian aggression. The best defense against Russian aggression is a successful Ukraine.”
