US ambassador: I quit Ukraine because Trump ‘complicit’ with Russia

Bridget Brink, Washington’s representative to Ukraine since 2022, ended a three-decade career after the president ‘put pressure on the victim’ of aggression.

Bridget Brink, centre, in Kyiv with the senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal in August. Picture: Kanuka Ruslan/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s policy of applying “pressure on the victim” of the Ukraine war lay behind the US ambassador’s decision to quit Kyiv after three years in the role, she said on Friday.

Bridget Brink said she brought an end to her 30-year diplomatic career because she could “no longer in good faith carry out the administration’s policy” and issued a call for America to “show leadership in the face of aggression, not weakness or complicity”.

Brink’s first public statement since she resigned last month comes at a delicate stage in Trump’s peace initiative after President Putin failed to show up in Turkey to negotiate with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Zelensky, days after calling for direct talks.

Trump has responded by declaring that no further progress can be made in the peace process until he talks face to face with Putin himself.

“I respect the president’s right and responsibility to determine US foreign policy – with proper checks and balances by US Congress,” Brink wrote in the Detroit Free Press, in her home state of Michigan.

“It is the role of America’s foreign service to execute that policy.

“Unfortunately, the policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia. As such, I could no longer in good faith carry out the administration’s policy and felt it was my duty to step down.”

Brink said she could not “stand by”, as she suggested were her new instructions from Washington, “while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded and children killed with impunity”.

Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office in February. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

They had a more amicable meeting at Pope Francis’s funeral in April. Picture: Getty Images

In a criticism of Trump’s approach to his peace initiative, in which he has berated Zelensky in the Oval Office while repeatedly refusing to criticise Putin, she urged the administration to “stand up for democracies and to stand against autocrats” as “the only way to secure US interests”.

“Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she said. “History has taught us time and again that appeasement does not lead to safety, security or prosperity. It leads to more war and suffering.”

Brink listed the toll of Russian aggression, including 700 children among thousands of civilians killed and 20,000 children abducted since it launched its offensive in February 2022, describing it as “pure evil”.

“Over a career spent in conflict zones, I’ve seen mass atrocities and wanton destruction first-hand but we have never seen violence so systematic, so widespread and so horrifying in Europe since World War II,” she wrote.

“If we allow Putin to redraw borders by force, he won’t stop with Ukraine … Russia’s war is about more than foreign policy or economics. It’s about who we are. The US must lead the free world.”

She recalled the three years her grandfather spent away from home fighting WWII in Europe. “The America I love, the one our grandparents served, would never stand by and let such horrors happen. Or give up helping our friends. Or appease the aggressor,” she concluded.

“We must show leadership in the face of aggression, not weakness or complicity. When America does not lead the free world, what is at risk is our own success as a nation.”

Brink in September with Antony Blinken, president Joe Biden’s secretary of state. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein/AFP/Getty Images

Brink earned a reputation in Kyiv as a tough operator who took flak from senior Ukrainians over president Joe Biden’s slow release of advanced weaponry and also for insisting on domestic reforms to counter corruption and the siphoning off of funds.

When Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, praised his angry treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office in February, Brink dutifully reposted her new boss’s post in Ukrainian and was bombarded with criticism.

Sources: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project, updated May 16.

The final straw may have been a second post on X of her own after a Russian attack on Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, which caused the single heaviest loss of civilian life this year. “Horrified that tonight a ballistic missile struck near a playground and restaurant,” she wrote. “More than 50 people injured and 16 killed, including six children. This is why the war must end.”

Zelensky responded critically in his nightly address over her failure to attribute the bombing to Russia. “Such a strong country, such a strong people – and such a weak reaction. They are even afraid to say the word ‘Russian’ when talking about the missile that killed children,” he said.

Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the state department, later said she was “not aware” of any instruction to Brink to tone down references to Russian aggression and “wouldn’t speak to anything regarding … a diplomat and the internal dynamics that might occur”. Brink resigned a few days later.

The Times