‘Afghanistan 2.0’? GOP Senators Demand Answers on Ukraine Evacuation

A group of Republican senators led by Joni Ernst told Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week that they were dismayed by the Biden administration’s failure to provide more information about the number of Americans still in Ukraine and demanded answers about its plans to evacuate them. Amid concerns about a repeat of the kind of chaos that accompanied the Afghanistan withdrawal, they raised questions about whether the State Department is fulfilling its legal obligations in this crisis — setting the stage for what is likely to be a critical debate surrounding a potentially imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The State Department failed to provide a reasonable or informed accounting of how many Americans remain in Ukraine now, estimating between 6,000 and 16,000 Americans,” the eight lawmakers wrote in a letter to Blinken on Wednesday. The letter also pointed out that the State Department said in an advisory on February 12 that it would not be able to evacuate U.S. citizens in the country in the event of a Russian invasion. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan also stated that “the President will not be putting the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk by sending them into a warzone to rescue people who could have left now but chose not to.”

Meanwhile, the administration has taken some steps to facilitate the evacuation of Americans from the country. The State Department earlier this week announced that it was relocating the U.S. embassy in Kyiv to Lviv, a city just 50 miles from the Polish border. It’s from that city that State is coordinating the evacuation of Americans over land routes crossing Ukraine’s borders with Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania.

But according to Ernst, who said during a Tuesday press conference that she hears echoes of the administration’s failure to plan in advance for the evacuation of Kabul, that’s not enough. Ukraine could become “Afghanistan 2.0,” she said, and “what we need from the State Department is more than a 1-800 number.” During the evacuation of Kabul, the Biden administration stuck to a self-imposed deadline for U.S. flights out of Afghanistan, leaving Americans stranded.

Late last year, Republicans from both houses of Congress and former Trump administration officials voiced sustained criticism of Blinken’s team for scrapping the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau — an entity created during the Trump administration on the orders of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — just ahead of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. That move, they said, left the State Department without the planning capabilities it needed to respond to the Afghan crisis. State maintained that the decision did not change its contingency planning capabilities.

Now, as the situation in Ukraine reaches a tipping point, that contention is being put to the test, with the Republican senators writing that the administration’s current position is “wholly inadequate” and that State “must do more to uphold its lawful responsibilities to protect and evacuate American citizens from Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion.”

The senators pointed to a joint State Department–Pentagon memo that states: “Ensuring protection of United States nationals in foreign countries is a fundamental obligation of the United States government. When U.S. citizens are in danger and the host nation is unable or unwilling to protect them, the U.S. government must be prepared to protect and/or evacuate its citizens.” Moreover, the senators cited U.S. law requiring the secretary of state to develop plans for the evacuation of Americans in danger.

In the view of Ernst and her colleagues, “closure of the U.S. embassy and pointing Americans toward flights or overland evacuations falls far short of this government’s obligations to its citizens — protection from foreign adversaries and assistance in fleeing sites of conflict.” Instead, they asked Blinken for an accounting of “the U.S. government’s evacuation and protection capabilities in Ukraine, transportation and lift capacity out of Ukraine, and the availability of safe holding and survival areas for staging evacuees.”

State’s current position is not likely to reassure them. In response to questions about the letter, a State Department spokesperson said that the department does not comment on congressional correspondence. However, that spokesperson provided extensive answers to National Review’s questions about U.S. efforts to help facilitate the departure of Americans from Ukraine, pointing to a months-long contingency-planning effort involving agencies across government and U.S. officials in Eastern Europe. “The U.S. government has been deeply engaged with our personnel in Ukraine and others in the region to prepare for a wide range of scenarios that may affect U.S. interests and citizens in the face of a large-scale Russian invasion,” the spokesperson said.

However, while State “goes to great lengths” to help Americans in danger, the spokesperson said, “it is impossible to reach every individual.”

“In the case of Ukraine, as the security situation has degraded, the Department has fulfilled its obligation to U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson further said, pointing to advisories issued by the U.S. embassy in Kyiv about travel options, land borders, and financial assistance for those who can’t afford commercial travel and the overland evacuation efforts.

But these are precisely the steps named in the senators’ letter that fall short of the State Department’s legal obligations in the situation now unfolding.