One of her professors, a European history specialist, announced that he opposed women being admitted. In her memoir, she devotes particular attention to snubs and put-downs endured on account of gender. It had gone co-ed less than a decade earlier but Yovanovitch counted on it being more fun. Later she received an offer from Smith, an all-women’s school in Massachusetts, but opted for Princeton. She was born in Canada and her family moved to the US when she was three. Yovanovitch’s parents fled the Nazis, then the Soviets. According to Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, Trump mocked his father as he succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

In the moment, she says, she also pondered if it was “better to interpret Trump’s question as suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine”. “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia,” Yovanovitch writes. Trump was commander-in-chief but according to Yovanovitch, he didn’t exactly have the best handle on where his soldiers were deployed.Īt an Oval Office meeting in 2017 with Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, Trump asked HR McMaster, his national security adviser, if US troops were deployed in Donbas in eastern Ukraine, territory now invoked by Putin as grounds for his invasion. If only thousands of dead Russian troops could talk. Trump, she writes, saw “Ukraine as a ‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”. On the page, Yovanovitch berates Trump for “his obsequiousness to Putin”, which she says was a “frequent and continuing cause for concern” among the diplomatic corps. But, of course, her short but momentous stint in the last administration receives particular attention.

Yovanovitch tells a story of an immigrant’s success. The author is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who Trump fired during his attempt to withhold aid to Kyiv in return for political dirt, an effort that got him impeached. With impeccable timing, Marie Yovanovitch delivers Lessons from the Edge, her memoir. The west is not as decadent or as flaccid as the tyrant-in-the-Kremlin and President Bone-Spurs bet. Russia’s economy is on its knees, its stock market shuttered, its shelves bare.

The world cheers for Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine, his besieged country.

Lessons from the edge marie yovanovitch