On Sunday, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine explained on CBS News why she had left her post in Kyiv and the dangers of letting Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin call all the shots.
“I resigned from Ukraine and also from the Foreign Service, because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,” Brink told her interviewer on the weekly “Face the Nation” program.
“I fully agree that the war needs to end, but I believe that peace at any price is not peace at all. It’s appeasement and, as we know from history, appeasement only leads to more war,” she said.
Brink, a career diplomat, was appointed as chief of mission to Kyiv in May of 2022 by then-President Joe Biden.
Unlike posh ambassadorships to places like Rome, Paris, London, Canberra, etc., which are almost always gifted to somewhat-qualified big donors to campaigns or political parties, ambassadorships to countries in Africa and Asia, or even Eastern European countries at war, are often filled by those who have spent decades in the US Foreign Service as consular officers who know the “business” inside and out.
Brink joined the US State Department in 1996 and served as a consular political officer in Belgrade until 1999. She then spent two years as an official in Cyprus before becoming a special assistant to the department’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs, where she served until 2004.
From 2008 to 2009, Brink served as the deputy director for southern European affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
Later, she was responsible for crafting policy in the Aegean (Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus) and in the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia). In 2011, Brink returned to Georgia as deputy chief of mission at the embassy, less than three years after the Kremlin’s bombing of that country ended in 2008.
On Sunday, in an op-ed published last Friday in the Detroit Free Press, in her native Michigan, Blink said that she couldn’t in good faith adhere to the diplomatic instructions coming out of the new White House.
On May 5, Julie S. Davis took over as the US chargé d’affaires in Kyiv.
In her interview on Sunday, the retired ambassador said that the goal of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv “has to be a peace that does things that advance our own interests, and those are really simple… It’s how to keep Ukraine free, how to deter Russia, and how to send the right signal to China. And this is what we should be doing.”
Brink mentioned that she got the first real signs in February of how Trump was going to handle the upcoming peace talks, bristling at the treatment of President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year when he visited the White House, and was mortifyingly attacked by Vice President JD Vance, since-ousted National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and other members of Trump’s inner circle.
“We’ve seen the devastation that happens when we appease aggressors, and we do not want to do that again,” Brink said. “So my strong advice in terms of how to deal with Putin and Russia is not to give a single meeting or concession or legitimacy until Putin agrees to an unconditional ceasefire that’s verifiable and moves forward toward a just and lasting peace.”