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director for law enforcement and justice sector programming for Europe and Asia, and then as the European Bureau's senior anticorruption coordinator.
In the summer of 2018, then-Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Wess Mitchell asked me to come back from Kyiv to Washington early to join his team as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to take charge of our eastern European Caucasus portfolio, covering six countries in the front line of Russian aggression and malign influence, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The administration's national security strategy, which Wess helped write, makes clear the strategic challenge before us great power competition, with peer or near-peer rivals, such as Russia and China and the need to compete for positive influence without taking countries for granted. In that sense, Ukraine has been on the front lines, not just of Russia's war in eastern Ukraine since 2014, but of the greater geopolitical challenges facing the United States today.
Ukraine's success, thus, is very much in our national interest in the way we have defined or national interests broadly in Europe for the last 75 years, and specifically in central and Eastern Europe, for the last 30 years, since the fall of the Wall in 1989. A Europe whole, free, and at peace -- our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign
