A former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine called on the Biden administration to begin an evacuation of Americans from Ukraine. John Herbst, Washington’s envoy to the country from 2003-2006 and now a senior director at the Atlantic Council, made the policy recommendation in a commentary for the think tank’s website.
“The administration should reverse its decision not to help evacuate American civilians from Ukraine. Thousands of Americans will be trapped there if Putin invades again and the US military has a long history of rescuing its citizens in dangerous circumstances,” said Herbst.
Herbst also wrote, “such an operation would also complicate Russian plans.” That mission was one action, among several sanctions measures targeting Russia, that he said the Biden administration should implement.
He was reacting to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions after officially recognizing their independence on Monday. That move by the Kremlin is widely viewed as a pretext to launch a further military assault on parts of Ukraine adjacent to the self-declared Moscow-backed governments still controlled by Kyiv. Earlier Tuesday, Putin specified that his orders applied to the areas claimed by but still outside of the control of the breakaway republics and asked the Russian Duma to authorize the Russian military to use force abroad.
President Biden spoke about the latest developments Tuesday at the White House: “He’s setting up a rationale to take more territory by force, and if you listened to his speech last night, he’s setting up a rationale to go much further.” Biden and other top U.S. officials have repeatedly urged U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine immediately, citing the risk of indiscriminate violence by Russian forces.
In response to a question from National Review last week, a State Department spokesperson said that, as of October, the U.S. was aware of 6,600 Americans in Ukraine, including tourists and visitors, a figure that Foggy Bottom has cited extensively in recent weeks. State, however, did not provide a more recent estimate.
A group of senators writing to Secretary of State Antony Blinken last Wednesday to demand a more robust evacuation effort said that State had put its latest estimate at between 6,000-16,000 Americans in Ukraine.
The Biden administration has said it would not be able to evacuate Americans from Ukraine, but the State Department has facilitated the departure of U.S. citizens via overland routes. The spokesperson last week also pointed to U.S. “welcome centers” for departing Americans in several of the countries bordering Ukraine. It is coordinating those efforts from Lviv, the site of the U.S. embassy, which was relocated from Kyiv last week.
But there’s been no move away from National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s previous comments 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.”
Blinken announced Monday that “Department of State personnel currently in Lviv will spend the night in Poland” and that they would “regularly return to continue their diplomatic work in Ukraine and provide emergency consular services.”