Visiting Kyiv, Austin and Blinken share plans to step up diplomatic presence in Ukraine

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new nominee to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and plans to bolster America’s diplomatic presence in the country when they met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Sunday night.

The two members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet also relayed that the United States will provide Ukraine with further economic and security assistance, as well as offer expanded military training for Ukrainian forces fending off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The announcement of the U.S. actions, outlined in a State Department news release, came after the conclusion of the secretive talks conducted in Ukraine’s capital. Zelenskyy revealed on Saturday that Austin and Blinken planned to visit Kyiv, but little was known about the details of their trip until Monday morning.

According to people with knowledge of the visit, Austin and Blinken traveled to and from Kyiv by train and crossed into Poland shortly before Russian missiles believed to have been fired from a bomber struck several railway lines — including one in Lviv, near the Polish border.

The meeting lasted three hours and was held inside a secure, windowless conference room inside Ukraine’s Presidential Administration building, known as Bankova, the people said.

Speaking to members of the traveling press in southeastern Poland after returning from Kyiv, Blinken said he and Austin “had an opportunity to demonstrate directly … our strong ongoing support for the Ukrainian government and for the Ukrainian people.”

“The bottom line is this,” Blinken said. “We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene. And our support for Ukraine going forward will continue. It will continue until we see final success.”

In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Austin escalated Washington’s wartime rhetoric toward Moscow, warning that U.S. officials “want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Russia “has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly,” Austin said. “And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

In their meeting with Ukrainian officials, Blinken told Zelenskyy that Biden plans to nominate Bridget Brink, currently the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, according to the State Department news release. The post has remained unfilled since then-President Donald Trump fired Marie Yovanovitch, although Brink has long been considered a top contender.

Blinken also relayed that U.S. diplomats will be returning to Ukraine this week. The Biden administration closed the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in February and has been under pressure to reopen it in recent weeks. More than a dozen European countries, as well as the European Union, already have reopened their Kyiv missions or intend to do so.

At the beginning of the meeting with Austin and Blinken, Zelenskyy “stressed the importance of the visit of American high-ranking officials to Kyiv at this crucial and important moment for the Ukrainian state,” according to the Ukrainian readout of the meeting.

“We appreciate the unprecedented assistance of the United States to Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said. “I would like to thank President Biden personally and on behalf of the entire Ukrainian people for his leadership in supporting Ukraine, for his personal clear position. To thank all the American people, as well as the Congress for their bicameral and bipartisan support. We see it. We feel it.”

Zelenskyy thanked the United States for the roughly $3.4 billion in security assistance it has delivered to Ukraine, but he argued that U.S. sanctions on Russia “should be further strengthened” and emphasized “the importance of expanding the opportunities for Ukrainian goods to access the American market.”

Christopher Miller contributed to this report.