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.”
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