78 Time December 23–30, 2019
pledges on the West Front of the Capitol : to de-
fend the Constitution. The courage they sum-
moned was not to break the law, but to follow it.
It was a wednesday nIght in April at
the Kyiv residence of the U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, a brick and stucco mansion that sits
close enough to the Orthodox church next
door that you could hear the choir. Guests
passed through the columns of the portico to
greet America’s top diplomat in the country,
Marie Yovanovitch. She was hosting an event
to honor a young anticorruption activist killed
last year in an attack with sulfuric acid. But
even as she greeted top members of the newly
elected government of President Volodymyr
Zelensky, she kept getting calls urging her to
return immediately to the embassy to talk to
the State Department in Washington on a se-
cure line.
Slipping out of the event at 9 p.m. while
the guests were still mingling, she made the
30-minute drive to her office in the walled em-
bassy compound. After being told to stand by
for important news in a first call with Washing-
ton, she worked at her desk until she received
a second at 1 a.m. Her urgent, unexplained
orders : take the next flight back to Washing-
ton. The order was so abrupt that Yovanovitch
did not have time to organize the trip home for
her then 90-year-old mother, who had been liv-
ing with her at the residence in Kyiv.
A veteran diplomat who had served from
Mogadishu to Moscow, Yovanovitch had
known something murky was afoot. In Feb-
ruary, a senior Ukrainian official had told her
he had been rebuffing repeated attempts by
Giuliani to discuss investigations into Demo-
crats and the 2016 election. At some point, Gi-
uliani and his associates decided Yovanovitch
was also an obstacle to those aims. The official,
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, told her two
Giuliani associates were telling people that she
should be replaced and warned her to watch
her back. Other Ukrainian officials seemed to
be starting to treat Giuliani, not Yovanovitch,
as the U.S. representative in Ukraine.
By March, the campaign against her had
broken into the open. Ukraine’s then Pros-
ecutor General, Yuriy Lutsenko, had alleged
in an interview with a U.S. publication that
Yovanovitch had given him a “do not prose-
cute” list during their first meeting in 2016.
Lutsenko later retracted the claim, but
Trump himself promoted the story on social
media. In late March, Donald Trump Jr. at-
tacked her on Twitter, calling her a “joker.”
Concerned that her credibility was being
DAVID HOLMES
Counselor for political affairs, U.S. embassy in Ukraine
As an embassy staffer in Ukraine, Holmes
became one of the few direct witnesses to Trump’s effort
to investigate political rivals when he overheard
Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s phone conversation
with the President during a lunch in Kyiv.(^2019) GUARDIANS OF THE YEAR