Ukraine Betrayal

When Marie Yovanovitch was introduced to the broader American public, it was not as the polished State Department professional she had been for more than three decades but rather as a key witness to a tawdry episode of political intrigue.

At a time when few Americans knew—or cared—about Ukraine, when most knew nothing about President Volodymyr Zelensky, and weren’t even aware of the U.S. pledge of military aid to that country, Ambassador Yovanovitch was targeted by then-president Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, to remove her from their path.

In the plot that led to his first impeachment, Trump and his henchmen tried to extort the Ukrainian government to say it was investigating corruption by Joe Biden who Trump perceived to be the most viable Democratic candidate for president. Trump threatened to withhold military aid if Zelensky did not agree.

Guiliani saw Ambassador Yovanovitch, who is noted for her anti-corruption work, as an obstacle to their plans and launched a smear campaign to undermine her influence. Trump, in a phone call to Zelensky, called the ambassador “bad news” and prophesied she “going to go through some things.”

It was a prophesy all the president’s men could make happen. The State Department, which had reportedly just asked Yovanovitch to extend her tour in Ukraine for another year, crumbled under pressure and ordered her to return to Washington “immediately.”

“I felt betrayed by the State Department, which had been my professional home for more than 30 years,” she said in a phone interview this week. “They did not stand by me. They said I had done nothing wrong but still effectively fired me. My head was spinning.”

It was a whistleblower who ultimately revealed the Trump administration’s Ukrainian machinations. With the impeachment process underway Yovanovitch was called to testify before Congress, becoming a key witness. “I was shocked and devastated that I would feature in a phone call between two heads of state in such a manner where President Trump said that I was ‘bad news’ to another head of state,” she testified.

Yovanovitch has told the story of her long ascent and abrupt descent as a career diplomat in an effective new book, Lessons from the Edge. She will tell of her experiences June 1 at 7 PM as the guest speaker for the Salisbury Forum. The in-person program will be held at Housatonic Valley Regional High School and those wishing to attend should pre-register by going to www.salisburyforum.com.

Veteran though she was and as cynical as her years in diplomatic service had made her, it was the shock of her recall that led to her retirement from the State Department in 2020. By then she had served the United States in a wide variety of positions from early postings to Moscow, London and Mogadishu through ambassadorial appointments in Kyrgystan, Armenia and Ukraine. Along the way, she had encountered corruption and chauvinism—she termed the criterion for State Department employment as “pale, male, and Yale”—but remained hopeful about being able to “help other countries to strengthen their democracies.”

“What gave me the strength to handle stress in my professional life was that I was working within State Department policy,” she said. “I wasn’t freelancing.”

Yovanovitch also credits her parents for bringing her up “to be a strong, independent woman, with a strong faith in religion and democracy. If you have a strong compass, it gets you through a lot of things.”

Her belief in democracy as a social strategy is unshaken despite knowing that the free and democratic United States has sometimes propped up reprehensible dictators to serve American “strategic objectives.” In her own work she made anti-corruption efforts a priority. So, she explained, she wasn’t surprised that Ukrainians, who had long benefited from corruption, sought to remove her. What she hadn’t expected was that officials in her own country would readily agree.

“What continues to amaze me,” she said in her testimony, is that a coterie of corrupt Ukrainians had “found Americans willing to partner with them and, working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. ambassador.”

Both through her professional life and her family’s experience, Canadian-born Yovanovitch understands the significance of life under a totalitarian regime. She is the daughter of immigrants who fled both the Nazis and the Soviets. The family moved first to Canada and thence to Kent when she was a toddler. Her father taught at Kent School, from which she graduated before going on to Princeton to earn a degree in Russian studies, followed by work at the Pushkin Institute and the National War College.

In this perilous moment in our nation’s history, she urges Americans to work for the freedoms we have so long enjoyed. “We’ve forgotten history,” she said. “What we have forgotten is that we need to tend it and defend it to make it endure. I grew up during the Cold War but today people have no memory of that at all. If you have never been to a country where there is no freedom, it is hard to understand what that means.”
She referred to a Russian woman arrested for painting her fingernails yellow and blue. “You can’t say ‘No War’ without facing 15 years in prison—that is what it means,” she said.

She is resolute in her opinion that the world must restrain Putin’s aggression. “It’s so critical that the U.S. and other allies and partners continue to help Ukraine,” she said. “We are seeing that Ukraine is winning and will win with our help. This is a war about Putin’s Ukraine obsession but it is also something bigger. After Ukraine, he wants to keep going.”

For the faint of heart, who worry about escalation of the war, she warns, “We need to remember this: Putin is the aggressor and Putin is a bully. When we say we don’t want to do something because it will be provocative, he sees that as weakness. It’s important not be deterred by his rhetoric and, to an extent, by his actions. There is risk in taking action but there is also risk in not taking action.”

She believes it is a “good move” to grant NATO membership to Finland and Sweden. “This brings additional capabilities into the alliance. Here is a question we can ask ourselves—if they don’t join the alliance, do you think he will be less aggressive?”

She referred to Putin’s successive wars against Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea, explaining that Russia is an expansionist country that wants to reassert its historic borders while gaining access to warmer-water ports and putting more space between Moscow and its borders.

But there is a much larger issue for Putin, she says. “He can’t compete. His system is pretty bankrupt—people are not immigrating to Russia looking for opportunity. He can’t compete so he is trying to create a world where might makes right.”

She says, since World War II, there has been an rules-based international order based on the post-war conviction that “we cannot have this again.”

“Over the decades, we established institutions like NATO and the United Nations, treaties were made and principals were established for how countries deal with each other,” she said. “If we have border disputes, we can go to negotiation. We can pick apart the UN and other institutions like NATO but they have kept people more secure, more prosperous and more free for a long time. If Putin is successful in Ukraine, there is no doubt he will continue. We have to think about the world we want to live in in the next 25-30-100 years. We have to think what we need to put together as a system to carry us forward.”

Returning to the theme of the erosion of democracy around the world, she conceded, “We are seeing more dictators and the erosion of democratic attitudes and behaviors. If we are concerned, we should take action. Education is one thing—we should bring back Civics classes—and we need to vote, to get involved in our communities. Democracy thrives where there is community and trust, a belief that, ‘I might lose this election but I can run again.’

“People should get involved with the Boy Scouts, with beautification projects, get involved because there is a dangerous corner that needs a stop light. Not everyone will have the same political beliefs but we can agree that a corner is dangerous and do something about it. That helps to build trust in other ways.

“We have made mistakes in our history but for me the U.S. is still the ‘shining city on the hill,’” she concluded. “I actually think it is. Just because we are not perfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep on trying and that we shouldn’t help others to strengthen their democracies.”