Masha, as almost everyone calls her, was in my college Russian class years ago, though her skills were, as the pitiless transcripts reveal, infinitely better than mine. She served in Embassies in Somalia and Russia; in various roles at the State Department; and then as the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, to Kyrgyzstan, and, from 2016 to 2019, as an Obama appointee, to Ukraine.
In Kyiv, Yovanovitch spent much of her time trying to cajole Ukrainian officials and businesspeople to move beyond a culture of corruption, an impulse that earned her some influential enemies. In 2019, she fell victim to a smear campaign organized by, among others, corrupt officials in Kyiv, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and the right-wing media. Deemed disloyal to Trump—“a stooge,” according to Giuliani—she was summoned back to Washington and summarily fired. Meanwhile, Giuliani and others were trying to get the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had business dealings in Ukraine. Trump, in his fateful telephone call to Zelensky—a crucial milestone in the chain of misdeeds that led to impeachment—said that Yovanovitch was “bad news.” Yovanovitch, in her testimony to Congress, four months later, said, “Our Ukraine policy has been thrown into disarray, and shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an American Ambassador who does not give them what they want.”
Yovanovitch’s parents emigrated from Europe to Canada after the Second World War and then came to the U.S. She grew up in Kent, Connecticut. After her appearance before Congress, she became a kind of Trump-era folk hero—the modest professional diplomat turned whistle-blower. Her memoir, “Lessons from the Edge,” will be published in mid-March. We recently spoke about events in Ukraine and Russia, as well as her experiences with the Trump Administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Masha, it must be painful to watch as Putin’s Army invades a place you lived in and cared about so much.
This is now an overused word, but it’s devastating. It’s devastating for me on a personal level. More importantly, it’s devastating to so many of the people whom I know in Ukraine and who are bravely fighting the Russian military.
Are you hearing from those friends?
I am. I’m also hearing from friends who were lucky enough to be able to leave Ukraine. And I’m hearing from people who are now in Poland, who are trying to help refugees or trying to provide supplies to Ukraine. It’s a desperate time.
Did this take you by surprise?
On the one hand, Putin has been signalling this for a long time, both in his rhetoric and in his actions. There was that speech in 2005, when he said that “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century was the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. There was his calling out of NATO, in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference. And there was his invasion of Georgia, in 2008, which was a seminal moment—and where we reacted, perhaps, not strongly enough. Putin is a bully. If he isn’t met with strength, he’s gonna keep going.
Was there intelligence that Putin could invade Ukraine?
Well, I retired from the State Department back in 2020, so I don’t have access to the intelligence anymore. But, yes, I’m sure that there were all sorts of privileged communications. One of the things that the Biden Administration has done, which I can’t remember seeing before, is quickly declassifying intelligence and sharing it with the world. I’m sure not everything was declassified, but an awful lot of it was, and it took away some of the element of surprise.
Putin has a litany of resentments and reasons for his actions. They include the eastward expansion of NATO, and whatever the U.S. intelligence agencies may or may not have done to help foment the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also points to our actions in Kosovo and Iraq, the sense that the U.S. acts with impunity. A lot of people who are horrified by the invasion point to these factors, too. How would you respond?
Well, that’s certainly the Russian narrative, Putin’s narrative. But what should we have done differently? What should we have said to the countries of Central Europe, who had fears of their own, and fears that they would be left in a no man’s land? Should we have said, “Yeah, we’re just not interested”? I think that would’ve been a mistake. You know, the thing about the United States and NATO and the European Union is that we have ideas. We are about democracy and freedom and capitalism and security, as well as individual liberties. It’s a fact that people are better off under democracies.
And, since World War Two, that has been the single most important driver of American influence and power. Yes, we have a big military. Yes, we have a strong economy. But it’s our ideas that attract others. Russia under Putin doesn’t really have that power of attraction. He only has the power of coercion, and we are seeing that now in Ukraine in a brutal way.
I’m not saying that the U.S. has always acted perfectly. We’ve certainly made our share of mistakes. But NATO is a defensive alliance. It does not pose a threat to Putin or Russia. In fact, the leaders of Europe and President Biden were trying to ratchet down tensions before all this.
How far will Putin take this? The invasion hasn’t gone the way he would’ve liked, but maybe time is on his side. The sheer volume of arms is on his side. What does he want here?
I think he wants to control Ukraine. When I was in the country, from 2016 to 2019, I always felt that he didn’t really want to own Ukraine, because then there’s at least a modicum of responsibility. He would have to provide services. But he wanted to make sure that Ukraine didn’t have the power of self-determination. He wanted to keep it in his sphere of influence. What he discovered—due, ironically, to his own actions, particularly the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbass—was that he is the single biggest driver since independence, in 1991, of bringing the Ukrainian people together.
When I was in Ukraine in the early two-thousands, nobody knew the words to the national anthem. By the time I came back, in 2016, everybody knew the anthem. They put their hands on their hearts. The same is true now, as Russian troops are targeting kindergartens.