In an October speech about modernizing the State Department, Blinken laid out the concerns he’d heard from many U.S. The administration’s reluctance to resume diplomatic activity in Kyiv is surprising given what Blinken and other top Biden aides have advocated in recent years. officials returning to Ukraine would improve our ability to coordinate with security forces and various contributing nations so we can collectively sustain Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield,” Inhofe said in a statement. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who pointed out that the Biden team “has not even suggested it will return its diplomats to anywhere in the country.” “You can’t do that from any place other than Kyiv.” “They listen to, get messages from, hear what the Ukrainians are thinking,” Taylor said, noting that such exchanges go both ways. diplomats believe they can do their jobs better in the capital, where they have more access to Ukrainians of all backgrounds, including government officials. ambassador to Ukraine, said a number of American diplomats assigned to Ukraine have told him they are eager to return to Kyiv. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) argued that the embassy should reopen because Kyiv is “the moral capital of the world and the locus of the most important American foreign policy enterprise in years.”Īnd William Taylor, a former U.S. Risch also urged Biden to officially nominate an ambassador to Ukraine, a post that has sat empty for years due to a variety of reasons. Jim Risch of Idaho, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. presence in Kyiv is vital to efforts to assist the Ukrainians,” Sen. embassies have operated in similar environments before, and a renewed U.S. lawmakers from both parties have called on Biden to send American diplomats back to the Ukrainian capital. diplomats had, in an earlier phase, temporarily relocated from Kyiv. On Monday, it launched missiles at Lviv, a city in Ukraine’s west where U.S. On Friday, Russian missiles struck a factory on the outskirts of Kyiv that it claimed had produced the Ukrainian missiles that hit Russia’s flagship cruiser, the Moskva, and caused it to sink in the Black Sea. The discussion is ongoing as Russia has pulled its troops away from the Kyiv area and is concentrating its attacks on Ukraine’s east, giving the capital some room to breathe.