15 Minutes That Mattered Wartime Assistance to Ukraine THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2024 31 Foreign Service Officer David Schlaefer is deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong and Macau. He was senior assistance coordinator at Embassy Kyiv during Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2021-2022 and again in 2023-2024. He joined the Foreign Service in 1994 and has also served in Brazil, Mexico, Finland, Iraq, Japan, Romania, and has had several assignments in Washington, D.C., including as deputy special envoy to the D-ISIS Coalition and deputy coordinator for Counterterrorism. This article is written in memory of the late FSO Sarah Langenkamp, Embassy Kyiv’s superhero who did so much for Ukraine. The massive U.S. assistance mission to Ukraine began at a roadside council of Embassy Kyiv evacuees in Poland. An FSO who was there tells the story and draws some lessons. BY DAVID SCHLAEFER Y ou never know when it’s going to happen, when those 15 minutes are going to come. It’s usually unexpected—a midnight phone call, a shrieking klaxon siren, or a hastily arranged Emergency Action Committee meeting that changes your life and career trajectory. You can’t be sure of timing, location, or impact; but for most members of the Foreign Service, there will come a moment once or twice in your career when a sharp line neatly divides everything that came before and everything that came afterward. That inflection point came for me in February 2022. As the senior assistance coordinator at U.S. Embassy Kyiv, I had been managing an annual Ukraine appropriation of just over a half billion dollars. Now, with Russia’s invasion imminent and the embassy evacuated, I found myself standing on the side of the road just across the Polish border with about 10 colleagues. Just that morning, we had received hazy instructions from Washington to flee Ukraine and use ordered departure to return immediately to the States. ON FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TODAY FOCUS
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