State Department Beefs Up U.S. Diplomatic Presence in Kyiv

The U.S. State Department is planning to send several dozen diplomats to the overstretched U.S. Embassy in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv and to give officials more flexibility to travel around the surrounding region, four people familiar with the decision told Foreign Policy. The move comes despite fears within the Biden administration that the presence of any more U.S. diplomats or military personnel in Ukraine would increase the risk of Washington getting entangled with shooting war with Russia.

The decision, communicated to members of Congress last month, could add up to 30 to 40 additional staff to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to help Ambassador Bridget Brink handle a workload that includes overseeing the nearly $45 billion in U.S. military aid that has flowed into Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, as well as billions more in assistance provided to prop up Ukraine’s economy and energy grid.

It will also allow Brink and other diplomats to travel freely throughout Kyiv Oblast, which extends from the suburbs of Ukraine’s capital all the way to the border with Belarus, without seeking prior approval from the White House. U.S. diplomats and contractors in Ukraine had previously been limited to travel only within Kyiv’s city limits without approval from the National Security Council (NSC), according to current and former officials as well as congressional aides familiar with the matter.

The change comes after more than a year of bipartisan pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to increase the size of the embassy’s staff, as a lack of policy hands inside the country has left the U.S. diplomatic mission overstretched and limited in what it can do.

“The embassy staff in Kyiv is too small, and the folks that are there can’t get outside the city to even talk to people closer to, but not on, the front lines about how things are really going,” Sen. Jim Risch, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate foreign relations panel, told Foreign Policy in an emailed statement. “That is what is really needed. Other embassies in Kyiv don’t have this problem. I don’t know why the administration is so afraid.”

Right now, there are between roughly 100 to 200 U.S. diplomats and military personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, current and former officials said, though the exact figure is not publicized for security reasons. That is a jump from about a couple dozen diplomats in the summer of 2023, according to one Eastern European diplomat familiar with the matter.

Foreign Policy previously reported that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had a staff of about 800 people before the war, though the bulk of them were locally hired Ukrainian employees. European countries returned personnel to their embassies in the Ukrainian capital at prewar levels much faster than their U.S. counterparts.

“The embassy is overworked and understaffed,” said William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who now works at the U.S. Institute of Peace think tank. Taylor said the embassy has pleaded with top Biden administration officials for months to increase staff, and the recent increase will help ease the burden on the overworked employees. “It’s not yet at the levels it was before the war, but it is moving up in that direction.”

Debates in Washington over what its diplomatic footprint in Kyiv should look like have heated up just as European countries are debating whether to put actual boots on the ground in Ukraine to help train its military to fight against Russia. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said he could not rule out deploying NATO member troops to Ukraine, a statement that drew backlash in Germany and prompted more nuclear saber-rattling from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The threat of Western officials ending up in Russia’s line of fire was made evident on Wednesday, when an apparent Russian missile attack struck within 300 feet of a convoy carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. No one from either delegation was injured or killed, Ukrainian officials told reporters, although five others closer to the strike were killed.

A State Department spokesperson said that the safety and security of U.S. government personnel is “our top priority” and that the department “continuously evaluates the security environment in Ukraine, adjusting as needed and warranted to enable our personnel to carry out their mission as safely, securely, and effectively as possible given ongoing military attacks by Russia against targets throughout Ukraine.”

Yet there is also mounting frustration within the State Department’s ranks about the Biden administration’s risk aversion around the activities of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and the challenges caused by the limited number of diplomats staffing an overworked wartime embassy. U.S. officials and congressional aides familiar with the issue said that the travel restriction is emblematic of “extraordinary micromanagement” of Ukraine policy from the White House.

“The administration decisions are controlled almost entirely by the White House—that’s both on staffing as well as movement in-country,” said a Republican congressional aide familiar with the issue.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion, the NSC has had country clearance authority for U.S. officials and lawmakers entering and exiting Ukraine, an authority that usually belongs to the top U.S. diplomat in the country. Brink, with the help of the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, sent a memo protesting the travel restrictions that has been gathering dust in Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s office for more than a year, according to two people familiar with the situation. It wasn’t immediately clear why the change came down in the past few weeks.

In the early days of the war, the doors of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv were shut, and not even congressional delegations were allowed into the country. But now, the embassy has reopened, and it must host and coordinate a steady stream of visits by members of Congress, senior diplomatic and national security leaders from Washington, and think tank experts visiting Ukraine. This adds more responsibilities for the already overworked embassy staff.

While Congress has protested the movement restrictions and personnel caps, current and former officials said the administration has to balance the safety of U.S. government personnel with the importance of Washington’s diplomatic and military activities to support Ukraine’s war effort. More people translates to a higher risk of U.S. government officials being killed or wounded in Russian strikes. The U.S. government has to be “very careful; they do take American safety seriously and they want to be sure they can protect all the people that are there,” said Taylor, the former U.S. ambassador.

In some conflict zones in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East, the State Department puts strict rules in place on travel for U.S. officials, a policy dating back to the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four U.S. diplomats and staff, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. In Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia, U.S. officials face restrictions on leaving their embassies without higher approval from Washington.

But the size and complexity of support to Ukraine has raised questions both in Kyiv and Washington about the bunkered-down approach. Critics worry that the rules have limited the ability of the United States to rapidly react to problems that Ukraine faces in absorbing and deploying massive amounts of military aid and equipment provided by Washington.

Speeding up more U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, particularly air and missile defense systems, could reduce the risk to U.S. personnel on the ground and make it easier to expand the size of the embassy, said Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think tank.

“Whatever staff we currently have is not enough to be able to manage the huge influx of U.S. funding that’s come in,” Polyakova said.

One-third of staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv are devoted to “accountability” for U.S.-funded assistance programs in Ukraine, according to the State Department spokesperson. Lawmakers also want more American officials on the ground in Kyiv to conduct oversight of where U.S.-provided weapons are going and how they are being used—something that Ukraine’s advocates in Washington say will benefit both countries.

In past conflict zones, U.S. embassy personnel, including defense cooperation officials, have had the ability to give foreign allies more granular information about how to use U.S. weapons systems—such as tips on targeting and firing artillery, for instance.

And officials said that the movement restrictions—which also apply to U.S. contractors—have created bottlenecks in Ukraine’s defense, preventing experts from going to the front lines to help fix U.S.-provided weapons and squeezing the already stretched military maintenance pipeline. For instance, Ukrainian companies aren’t licensed under U.S. export law to repair U.S.-made M777 howitzer barrels; they can make copies, but they risk infringing on intellectual property rights in doing so.

Ukraine plans to start producing its first batch of 155 mm artillery rounds next year, a type of ammunition that has become crucial in the World War I-style, artillery-heavy battles that have come to define how the war is being waged. Ukrainian officials are expecting more U.S. Defense and State Department advisors to arrive to help out the air defense and ammunition industries by early next year.

Meanwhile, European officials and contractors are taking a different approach. The German arms giant Rheinmetall, which produces the Marder infantry fighting vehicles used by Ukrainian troops, will begin producing its first armored vehicles in Ukraine next year, and the British contractor BAE Systems kicked off local production of 105 mm light guns in August.