In a phone call with Ukraine’s newly elected president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019, Trump said that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.” (Zelenskyy, she writes, “piled on” during the phone call, calling her a “bad ambassador” the book was completed before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. Yet the survival instinct she also inherited from her parents forced her to recognize that she couldn’t count on being protected by those rules anymore. She remembers how a “feeling of otherness” had inculcated in her a sense of caution, “a lifelong habit of observing before acting.” As a “rules-follower to the core,” Yovanovitch knew she “had done nothing wrong.” Yovanovitch was the child of immigrants who had fled the Soviets and the Nazis - a family history that she briefly recounts with tenderness and immediacy. “Rudy Giuliani, the hero of 9/11, was trying to dig up dirt in Ukraine about former Vice President Biden and smear me because I was getting in the way of his schemes. She even feared opening up to friends what was happening was so convoluted and bizarre that she was bound to come across as a “crazy lady with an enormous ego,” she says. The State Department had tried to keep her from testifying.

During the hearings, Yovanovitch sounded calm and self-assured, but in her book she describes how scared she was.

But she was “incredulous” that Trump had apparently decided to remove her based on false claims by associates of Rudy Giuliani, who as Trump’s personal lawyer was trying to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the Biden family. Yes, Yovanovitch knows that ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president. “What continues to amaze me,” she said in her testimony, is that a coterie of corrupt Ukrainians had “found Americans willing to partner with them and, working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. But she hadn’t expected officials in her own country to green-light, much less actively encourage, such machinations. That uncertain future would eventually include her memorable testimony at the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in November 2019, when Yovanovitch explained how she wasn’t surprised that Ukrainians who had long benefited from corruption had sought to remove her, given that she had made anti-corruption efforts a priority. E-Pilot Evening Edition Home Page Close Menu

Marie yovanovitch book review