Spencer Finley – Staff Writer
sjf5814@psu.edu

On Wednesday, October 12, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch came to Penn State Behrend. During her discussion with Dr. Lena Surzhko-Harned, an associate teaching Professor of Political Science, talked about several topics, including her time in the foreign service and the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Early on in the lecture, Dr. Surzhko-Harned asked Yovanovitch about what inspired her to get involved in the foreign service. She responded that she had “always been interested in history and foreign policy and travel, and so I always had the foreign service in the back of my mind.” She said that she “took detours,” working for a marketing company in New York. She was inspired to go into the foreign service when the U.S. invaded Grenada because she “needed to be in a job where I could actually be involved in issues of the day, because that was what was important to me, and my peers needed to be people who were interested in these issues as well.” 

Dr. Surzhko-Harned also asked Yovanovitch about the community and the kind of people who thrive in diplomatic posts. Yovanovitch responded that adaptability to change and strong people skills are critical, saying that “It’s odd that I chose that kind of life, because first of all, I’m an introvert, and second of all, I hate change.” She elaborated on this, saying that “Here you are every two or three years, you’re changing your job, your changing often where you live, and even if you go back to a post- I was in Ukraine from 2001-2004, and I went back in 2016, but everything about the country was different.” 

She also talked about both the great rewards and the great challenges of life as a diplomat, saying that “It’s a hard life, it’s not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is so rewarding because A) it is so interesting, and B) you can make a difference every single day.” She continued by saying that even fairly low-level State Department employees have the ability to make a difference- she said that “Even as a relatively junior employee at the State Department, I could make a difference, and I did, and I knew it.” She also stressed the need for patience, saying that “Often in diplomacy, probably in many businesses, you don’t necessarily see that project through from day one to day three hundred whatever it is, 999 when you’re leaving the post.” She continued that “In negotiations, in diplomacy, you start planting the seed for whatever project, whatever development, whatever agreement, and sometimes you get lucky and you can see that through- but often times, you’re planting that seed for future teams who will carry forward, and carry forward until finally there is success when all the stars align.”

Dr. Surzhko-Harned asked Former Ambassador Yovanovitch several questions about the nature of the war in Ukraine. Dr. Surzhko-Harned started by asking Ambassador Yovanovitch why she thought that nobody believed U.S. intelligence that Russia would launch a large-scale military escalation in Ukraine. Yovanovitch said that it was likely because “it was hard to take in and accept it. I, too, was reluctant to accept it. But I was in the Washington area with friends who were working this issue, and while they were very proper, they didn’t share anything classified with me, it was clear that they believed what was being put out publicly, and they believed the intelligence.” 

Dr. Surzhko-Harned then turned to the current conflict in Ukraine, and asked the Former Ambassador what her sense of President Vlodomyr Zelensky was; she said that “This war has made him into one of the greatest wartime leaders that the world has seen, and certainly the greatest leader that we are seeing contemporaneously. He manages using his communication skills, which are off the charts, and his courage- just his raw courage. He is not only communicating, he is leading by demonstration. He stayed in Kyiv as there were hundreds of assassination groups looking for him, and he knew that, and he stayed and his family stayed.” She said that this was all the more incredible because, as she stated in an interview with the Beacon before the event, on February 23, Zelensky was a “Failing president, or at least a struggling president. His mandate, his popularity rating were down to the low 30s, he was worried about his reelection, there was incredible backbiting, vicious politics, he had arrested his predecessor, so he was struggling. And on February 24, he turned out to be the Winston Churchill of our time.” In a continuation of her response to Dr. Surzhko-Harned’s question, she further said that she would “add one little caveat to this, and it is that he is a wartime president. What does that mean for peacetime, and once there is an end to the fighting, once there is a negotiated settlement, Ukraine is still going to be in ruins. So there are going to be billions of dollars that flow in one way or the other to rebuild. How is this going to be managed in a way that is transparent, and not according to the old ways? Because the Ukrainian people are not fighting right now to go back to the old ways. They are fighting to rebuild the country that is a new country that is governed by Western values.”