32 TIME April 11/April 18, 2022
WORLD
THE WINE WAS TOO WARM FOR KRIS-
tina Kvien, the top U.S. envoy to
Ukraine, so she stood up to get some
ice cubes from a waiter at the bar. It
was close to midnight in eastern Po-
land, the 11th night of the Russian in-
vasion of Ukraine, and for Kvien it was
the end of a long day of meetings with
U.S. military brass, members of Con-
gress, and senior Biden Administration
oicials. Her boss, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken, had left the city of
Rzeszow a few hours earlier after vis-
iting the U.S. supply lines to Ukraine.
Kvien had gone to see him of.
“It’s been crazy here,” she told me
that night in the restaurant of a hotel in
the city center, which has served as her
team’s headquarters since U.S. diplo-
mats evacuated Ukraine. “A couple of
days ago, I was sitting at this table with
Sean Penn.” The American actor, who
was working on a ilm in Ukraine when
the invasion started, had been forced
to lee over the border, abandoning his
car at the side of the road and walking
into Poland with a lood of refugees.
Kvien ran into him when he inally
made it to the hotel. “It feels a bit like
Casablanca,” she says.
Spend a few days driving back and
forth across this border, and the plot
of that wartime classic comes read-
ily to mind. The ilm premiered in
1942, less than a year after the attack
on Pearl Harbor forced the U.S. to join
World War II. Eighty years later, the
U.S. again inds itself drawn into a
major European war, and there is no
better place to witness its involvement
than on the plains of eastern Poland,
where a lood of assistance from the
U.S. and its allies has given Ukraine
its best chance of surviving this war,
and maybe even winning it. “All of us
are deeply, deeply committed to this
cause,” says Kvien, who has been the
top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine since
the start of 2020. “We’re here to help.
We’re part of it.”
Since the end of February, dozens of
U.S. military cargo planes have landed
on airields near the border, packed to
the brim with weapons. According to
the Pentagon, it’s the largest autho-
rized transfer of arms in history from
the U.S. military to any foreign coun-
try. Huge convoys of humanitarian aid
have also poured across the border,
ferrying everything from diapers to
bulletproof vests in eclectic modes of
transport: a Belgian ambulance on loan
to a playwright from Berlin; a minivan
helmed by a Ukrainian commando;
the jeep of a British car salesman, who
had driven for days to join the ight as
a volunteer, one of thousands coming
on their own accord from the U.S. and
Europe to help Ukraine defend itself.
My travels through this corridor
made one thing clear: the U.S. is a part
of this war, even if its troops are not
pulling the triggers. There are no plans
to send any American forces for com-
bat operations in Ukraine, a red line
that President Joe Biden drew again
during his trip to Poland on March 25.
But just about anything short of that
line seems to be fair game for Biden,
and that leaves the U.S. with plenty of
options for making sure the costs of
this war in blood and money become
unbearable for Russia, its military, and
its President.
As the humanitarian toll of the Rus-
sian onslaught intensiies, Biden has
ratcheted up his rhetoric in ways that
risk drawing the U.S. even deeper
into a conlict with a nuclear power.
After meeting with U.S. troops in east-
ern Poland on March 25, Biden called
Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” In
a speech the next day, he questioned
whether the Russian leader can remain
in power after all the sufering he has
caused in Ukraine. Biden’s primary
focus throughout the trip, however,
was on the aid the U.S. is providing
to Ukraine to alleviate that sufering.
“They need it now,” he told oicials
coordinating that aid at the airport in
Rzeszow. “They need it as rapidly as
we can get it there.”THAT AIRPORT, about an hour’s drive
from the border with Ukraine, was
also the spot where my journey began
a few weeks earlier, following the river
of aid toward supply hubs in western
Ukraine for distribution to the war
zone farther east.The irst stop along the way was the
hotel in Rzeszow, an unlikely nerve
center for the U.S. mission. Kvien, an
alumnus of the U.S. Army War Col-
lege, ended up here in early February,
soon after U.S. intelligence concluded
that a Russian invasion was immi-
nent. Her priority at the time was to
convince the Ukrainian government
that the invasion was coming, and to
help them get ready. That mission ran
into a wall of denial from President
Volodymyr Zelensky and virtually allT