U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Monday that he is set to nominate Bridget Brink to be the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
Earlier in the day, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that Brink’s “decades of experience make her uniquely suited for this moment in Ukraine’s history.”
Brink is currently the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia.
Brink, who is from Michigan, “previously served as senior advisor and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Tbilisi, Georgia,” Price said.
Brink began working in the State Department in 1996. She speaks Russian, Serbian and basic Georgian and French, according to the U.S. Embassy in Slovakia’s website.
Her nomination requires approval by the Senate.
The White House announcement of Biden’s pick for Ukraine ambassador came after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the highest ranking American officials to visit Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict in February.
During the visit, Blinken informed Zelenskyy of Biden’s choice of Brink as ambassador, CBS News reported.
In mid-February the State Department moved embassy operations from the U.S. embassy in Kyiv to Lviv after Russia began amassing troops at its border with Ukraine
After meeting with Zelenskyy, Blinken spoke at a press conference during which he said that American diplomats who have been working in Poland since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will begin returning to Ukraine this week. The State Department will follow up with looking at how it might reopen the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.
"We're doing it deliberately, we're doing it carefully, we're doing it with the security of our personnel foremost in mind, but we're doing it," Blinken said.