Early diplomatic career Yovanovitch joined the
United States Foreign Service in 1986. Her first foreign assignment, in
Ottawa, was followed by overseas assignments including
Moscow,
London, and
Mogadishu. From May 1998 to May 2000, she served as the deputy director of the Russia Desk in the U.S. Department of State. From August 2004 to May 2005, she was the senior advisor to the
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Yovanovitch also served as International Advisor and Deputy Commandant at the
National Defense University's
Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy and as dean of the School of Language Studies within the U.S. Department of State's
Foreign Service Institute. Yovanovitch was appointed
U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan on November 20, 2004; she presented her
credentials on February 4, 2005, and remained in this post until February 4, 2008. Her nomination as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan was
confirmed by the
Senate on a
voice vote. Yovanovitch was appointed
U.S. Ambassador to Armenia on August 4, 2008; she presented her credentials on September 22, 2008, and remained in this post until June 9, 2011. During confirmation hearings, Yovanovitch acknowledged that Turks had committed mass killings, rapes, and expulsions of Armenians between 1915 and 1923, calling this "one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century," but, in line with U.S. policy, declined to use the phrase
Armenian genocide, saying that the
use of this politically sensitive phrase was a policy decision that could be made only by the highest-ranking U.S. officials, namely President
George W. Bush and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. While in Armenia, Yovanovitch oversaw a staff of almost 400 Americans and Armenians in one of the largest embassy compounds in the world. She pushed Armenian authorities to give fair treatment to Armenians arrested in
post-election protests in 2008. After returning to Washington in 2012 and 2013, Yovanovitch served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovitch was announced as the nominee for U.S. ambassador to Ukraine on May 18, 2016, to replace
Geoff Pyatt; the nomination was sent to the Senate the next day, and confirmed by
voice vote of the Senate on July 14, 2016. Having been sworn in on August 12, Yovanovitch arrived in Ukraine on August 22 and during her tenure sought to strengthen the Ukrainian
National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which had been created to bolster efforts to fight
corruption in Ukraine; these efforts earned Yovanovitch some enemies within the country. On April 1, 2019, Yovanovitch spoke at an anti-corruption conference where she thanked Ukrainians for their courage and commitment to end corruption.
Smear campaign against Yovanovitch and ousting As
U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch was the target of a
conspiracy-driven
smear campaign. Allegations against her were then made by Trump's personal attorney
Rudolph W. Giuliani, as well as conservative commentator
John Solomon of
The Hill and Ukraine's then-top prosecutor,
Yuriy Lutsenko, who accused her of being part of a conspiracy involving anti-corruption probes in Ukraine and efforts by the Trump administration to investigate ties between Ukrainian officials and the
Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. Lutsenko, who has been accused by Ukrainian civil society organizations of corruption, and was interfering in his ability to combat corruption in Ukraine. Solomon's stories were nonetheless amplified by President Trump, his son
Donald Trump Jr., Giuliani, Solomon, and conservative media outlets. Ukrainians who opposed Yovanovitch were also sources for Giuliani, who "was on a months-long search for political dirt in Ukraine to help President Trump." On April 24, 2019, She returned to
Washington, D.C. on April 25, and her mission as ambassador being terminated on May 20, 2019. In a July 25, 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky (the contents of which became public on September 25, 2019), Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden and disparaged Yovanovitch to his foreign counterpart, calling her "bad news". Documents to the
House Intelligence Committee provided by
Lev Parnas, a former associate of Giuliani, outlined text exchanges in which Lutsenko pushed for the ouster of Yovanovitch and in return offered to provide damaging information on
Joe Biden. In
Russian-language messages, Lutsenko told Parnas that Yovanovitch (referred to as "madam") should be ousted before he would make helpful public statements; for example, in a March 22, 2019
WhatsApp message to Parnas, Lutsenko wrote, "It's just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam—you are calling into question all my declarations. Including about B." One week before an April 1, 2019 conference on anti-corruption, Parnas exchanged encrypted
WhatsApp text messages with
Robert F. Hyde that indicated the ambassador was under surveillance and that her security was at risk. Hyde claimed he had merely forwarded messages received from a Belgian citizen named Anthony de Caluwe. The recording appeared to corroborate Parnas' account that he had told Trump that night that Yovanovitch was working against Trump. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs
Philip Reeker, the chief diplomat for U.S. policy for Europe, testified that he had urged top State Department officials
David Hale and
T. Ulrich Brechbuhl to issue a statement expressing strong support for Yovanovitch, but that top State Department leadership rejected this proposal. The
American Foreign Service Association and
American Academy of Diplomacy, representing members of the U.S. diplomatic corps, expressed alarm at Trump's disparagement of Yovanovitch in his call with Zelensky.
Michael McKinley, a career foreign service officer who served as ambassador to four countries and had been chief adviser to Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, resigned in October 2019 in protest of Trump's attacks against Yovanovitch and "the State Department's unwillingness to protect career diplomats from politically motivated pressure." Yovanovitch's ouster became one of the issues explored in the
House of Representatives impeachment inquiry against Trump; In a January 2020 interview, Parnas apologized to Yovanovitch for his role in the smear campaign against her.
Congressional testimony On October 11, 2019, Yovanovitch gave closed-door
deposition testimony before the House
Oversight and Reform,
Foreign Affairs and
Intelligence committees. A transcript of Yovanovitch's full testimony was released to the public on November 5, 2019. Yovanovitch testified that her removal was the result of "significant tension between those who seek to transform the country and those who wish to continue profiting from the old ways," and that false narratives were pushed from an "unfortunate alliance between Ukrainians who continue to operate within a corrupt system, and Americans who either did not understand that corrupt system, or who may have chosen, for their own purposes, to ignore it." Yovanovitch described the State Department under Trump as "attacked and hollowed out from within," and warned that Russia and other U.S. rivals would benefit "when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system." Yovanovitch also detailed attempts by Giuliani to interfere in the State Department's consular decisions, by attempting to override a U.S. visa denial for former Ukrainian official
Viktor Shokin, who had been declared ineligible for travel in the United States based on his "known corrupt activities." On November 15, 2019, Yovanovitch testified during the
public impeachment hearings. In her testimony, Yovanovitch detailed how Giuliani and his associates
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman worked with a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor to orchestrate a smear campaign against her, oust her from her post as ambassador, and "circumvent official channels" of Ukraine policy. When read what the president had written about her, Yovanovitch testified: "It's very intimidating. I can't speak to what the president is trying to do, but the effect is to be intimidating."
Subsequent posting and retirement After being ousted as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch became a Senior State Department Fellow at
Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She is a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ==Works==