32 OCTOBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL There we were, a ragtag group with phones that didn’t work, near empty gas tanks in our stuffed-to-the-brim POVs, and no clear idea of what to do. During the next 15 minutes, as the first wave of refugees pushed past us, we made a collective decision to ignore our sketchy instructions from D.C. and stay the course, finding some way to continue to support Ukraine at the most critical of times. We wheeled our sputtering cars around, and instead of heading north to Warsaw and flights back to the States, we turned south to Krakow, our nearest consulate. None of us knew it at the time, but that short roadside war council was the start of the largest U.S. assistance mission in Europe since the Marshall Plan. Coming Together A quick call to Principal Officer Patrick Slowinski confirmed that they could accommodate us, and within hours, we were up and running at the consulate in Krakow and in touch with our local staff inside Ukraine. Our chargé and several other colleagues from whom we’d been separated wound up in Rzeszow at the PolishUkrainian border. We eventually all reunited and got to work. Over the coming weeks and months, this small interagency team—from consular, economic, political, and management sections; USAID; the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement; and the Justice Department—the remnant of what had been a sprawling mission, worked feverishly to facilitate the flow of emergency assistance into Ukraine. As the invasion unfolded, every significant assistance delivery was brokered in whole or in part by this team. It meant thouAmbassador Bridget Brink (center) and the Embassy- Kyiv-in-exile team in Rzeszow, Poland, immediately before returning to Ukraine in June 2022. The author is seventh from right. U.S. EMBASSY KYIV sands of pieces of body armor, hundreds of vehicles, tankers full of fuel, precious medical and food supplies, and, of course, security items reaching Ukraine in the nick of time. Lives were saved and Ukrainian resistance immeasurably strengthened. To quote Margaret Meade: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world.” Over the past two and a half years, our efforts in Ukraine have evolved into an assistance effort not seen since immediately after WWII. I’m always somewhat skeptical about the ability to distill universal lessons from so exceptional a set of circumstances. Another famous quote, this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson, often comes to mind: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But I have to think that somewhere amid the complexity of our assistance efforts are some hard-earned lessons with applicability beyond Ukraine. One thing is for certain. Our assistance to Ukraine has had a greater impact than any other contemporary large-scale assistance mission. We have made a difference. Convening Authority When thinking about some of the keys to our success, the overarching importance of lateral coordination among stakeholders is an obvious place to start. In Ukraine, we achieved this through a set of sectoral and thematic working groups at post. I had little subject matter expertise in any given area, but as the storm clouds gathered and invasion loomed ever larger, I used the only real authority I had, convening authority, to bring agencies together for discussions. Border issues, cybersecurity,
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