There is probably no country on earth that is more preoccupied with foreign and security policymakers in Washington than Ukraine. President Joe Biden has taken it upon himself to lead the West’s opposition to Russia’s war of aggression. For him, the country is a battlefield where the great struggle between democracies and dictatorships is being fought out, which he believes will shape the 21st century. So what is happening in Ukraine is very important to the US government. In this respect, Biden’s announcement that he was nominating Bridget Brink as the new ambassador in Kyiv has perhaps not unjustly led to some astonished questions: Bridget who?
Bridget Ann Brink is from Michigan and is probably in her early fifties. It’s not possible to be more precise because the US State Department has not yet announced the year of her birth. Brink went to high school in Michigan, graduated in 1987 and went on to study at the not well-known Kenyon College in Ohio. She earned a master’s degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and joined the United States Diplomatic Service in 1996.
Brink’s career was solid, but by no means outstanding or even brilliant. She specialized in Eastern Europe and the region of the former Soviet Union, the State Department sent her to posts in Serbia, Georgia and Uzbekistan. Between her stays abroad, she worked at the State Department in Washington in the European Department and at the National Security Council in the White House. In the spring of 2019, then-President Donald Trump nominated her as ambassador to Slovakia, and she took office there in August of that year after the Senate approved the appointment. Finally, a few days ago, the White House announced that Biden wanted to send Brink to Kyiv. The Senate still has to confirm this change.
A designer? Probably more of a rep
From a formal point of view, Brink is certainly qualified for the post of ambassador in Ukraine. As acting ambassador, she is high enough in the hierarchy. She knows the region, according to her official biography she speaks Russian. And wherever Brink has been on foreign assignments so far, she has had to deal with Moscow’s imperial claims. When Russian troops invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008, she was a department head at the American Embassy in Tbilisi. Her predecessor Marie Yovanovitch was slightly more senior and experienced when she went to Kyiv in 2016 – she had previously run two embassies, in Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. Yovanovitch was then removed from the dispute by Trump in 2019 after defying his attempts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
However, given Ukraine’s importance to American security interests in Europe, it would also have been conceivable that the White House would send someone to Kyiv with a little more diplomatic or political clout. The President is more or less free to appoint ambassadors. In the USA there is therefore the unpleasant custom of rewarding generous donors who helped out with money during the election campaign with posts as ambassadors. But nothing prevents a president from sending a close confidante to a particularly important country.
Brink may be a competent diplomat. But she will not be one of those ambassadors who can pick up the phone and call the White House to confer with the national security adviser or even the president on the short official route. She is more likely to be a representative of US policy towards Ukraine than a shaper.