Yovanovitch Quotes

Not this time. This was something as new as it was threatening. Corrupt actors in Ukraine were colluding with corrupt actors in the U.S., and they were successfully influencing our government and our people.

Boritesya—poborete.” “Fight on and you will prevail.

Mine is not a story of someone who is somehow stronger or more courageous than other people. It is of someone who is, frankly, ordinary, but who dug deep and met a challenge just as most Americans would do in similar circumstances.

I hadn’t fully realized that “merit” is a meaningless term if it’s not judged on a level playing field.

Dictators around the globe are betting on continued divisions in the U.S. and the opportunities to exploit them. They are hoping that our country becomes more like theirs and uses the tool of democracy -laws, elections, referenda - to produce undemocratic results. Putin calls it "managed democracy." And Putin and his ilk are doing whatever they can to influence our choices and our politics.

Just as in the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine conspiracy, we saw a ruthless, single-minded obsession with staying in power; a manifest lack of moral values, shame, and civility; and a stunning disregard of and disrespect for facts, truth, and expertise.

The problem has become so acute that successive secretaries of defense have asked Congress to provide the necessary funds for the Department of State. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, before he took on that role, famously stated that “if you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.

Yovanovitch’s testimony was an act of tremendous honor and importance.

Dictators around the globe are betting on continued divisions in the U.S. and the opportunities to exploit them. They are hoping that our country becomes more like theirs and uses the tools of democracy—laws, elections, referenda—to produce undemocratic results. Putin calls it “managed democracy.” And Putin and his ilk are doing whatever they can to influence our choices and our politics.

Second, and most personally troubling, Avakov said that Giuliani and Lutsenko wanted President Trump to remove me as ambassador.

Polling in Ukraine can sometimes be suspect, but I allowed myself to believe this one: nearly 84 percent chose me over the general prosecutor, and another 11 percent didn’t care. Barely 5 percent of respondents trusted their chief law enforcement official over me. In his own country.

That led to one of the only humorous moments in the day, when Republican counsel Steve Castor alleged that a Ukrainian minister “said some real nasty things” about Trump on social media during the 2016 campaign. With Trump’s bizarre tweet still front of mind, I dryly responded, “Well, sometimes that happens on social media,” to a ripple of laughter in the room. Even Castor had to chuckle.

Yovanovitch took the Russian threat very seriously. Speaking late in 2021 before the war on Ukraine, she said: “Russia is a historically expansionist empire. And Putin is a bully. And if we let him get away with it as we did in 2014, as we did in Georgia in 2008, as we did with Moldova, it’s just going to continue.” She also undertook, because it was US policy, to call out corruption and to encourage reforms from the Ukrainian government.

Corrupt actors in Ukraine were colluding with corrupt actors in the U.S., and they were successfully influencing our government and our people.

My Crystal Ball was in the middle of my last book pages.

On the bright side—and in the best Foreign Service tradition—I got a tremendous amount of on-the-job management training. It was humbling to learn that I usually wasn’t the smartest person in the room, but empowering to discover that I didn’t need to be. I realized that my team could accomplish way more if I trusted the subject-matter experts to take the lead. I was pleased to realize that I had the ability to recognize the best ideas and the skill to lead teams in implementing the heck out of those ideas. I learned that success at the top was about growing other people’s talents rather than trying to make myself the indispensable person in the room.

saw a completely broken system, one that not only featured a deprived population fearful of its own government but a government that hadn’t even delivered on communism’s basic promise of equality. Seeing how the Soviet system failed its people—materially, intellectually, spiritually—I was reminded again of that old saw about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others.

Every Russian citizen received vouchers to buy shares of the privatized companies. But with no understanding of how capitalism worked and no laws to watch out for them, hungry workers ended up selling their vouchers on the cheap, allowing the nimble, the strong, and the ruthless to accumulate significant ownership interests in lucrative companies.

My three years there had been jam-packed, both for Russia and for me. I had finally achieved my goal of becoming a political officer, and I had gotten hard-won experience to prepare me for my next posting.

In Kuchma’s Ukraine, the institutional corruption that had pervaded all aspects of life in the Soviet era continued unabated. Kuchma kept the Soviet system of “telephone justice,” where politicians picked up the phone and told prosecutors and judges what to do. Tax audits, civil suits, and criminal investigations were weaponized against political adversaries and even businessmen, embroiling them in costly and time-consuming legal battles and often causing them significant public embarrassment.