U.S. President Joe Biden is planning to nominate Bridget Brink as the ambassador to Ukraine, Bloomberg and CNN reported on Jan. 31, citing their sources. The Department of State has not yet confirmed the reports.
Brink currently heads the U.S. embassy in Bratislava. She has been appointed to this role in August 2019.
Brink joined the U.S. State Department in 1996 taking on various roles in foreign emissaries. She first served as a consular political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and later took on various diplomatic jobs in Georgia, Uzbekistan and Slovakia. She also held positions at the Department of State and the National Security Council.
Despite Ukraine’s importance as a European nation fighting a war against Russian invaders, the country hasn’t had a U.S. ambassador since 2019.
Ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was removed from her post in May 2019, after being dragged into the impeachment hearings of former U.S. President Donald Trump and coming under attack from U.S. right-wing media and politicians. The attacks were assisted by then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Since Yovanovitch’s dismissal ahead of schedule, Ukraine has been without an ambassador. The U.S. embassy was led briefly by Charge D’Affaires Kristina Kvien and later William Taylor, who previously served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2006-2009.
Since Jan. 1, 2020, the embassy has been again led by Kvien.
The last attempt to nominate an ambassador to Ukraine occurred in May 2020, when Trump nominated retired army general Keith Dayton. Being a political nominee, Dayton failed to pass Congress after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Biden.
On Jan. 19, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that an ambassador to Ukraine would be appointed “shortly.”
It’s ridiculous it took so long to appoint an ambassador to Ukraine.
She seems to have spent her diplomatic career in the region so that’s good. This is her first ambassadorship for a major country. Unfortunately she doesn’t speak Ukrainian according to Wikipedia. I guess we will see how she does.