She was “horrified” when President Trump berated Ukraine’s president on camera in the Oval Office. She thought the president’s peace overtures amounted to “appeasement.” But when she came under pressure to stop calling Russia the “aggressor” for invading its neighbor, it was just too much.
Bridget A. Brink, a career foreign service officer, resigned in April as ambassador to Ukraine in protest of Mr. Trump’s approach to the war. After serving five presidents of both parties for 28 years, she had finally been confronted with a policy she could not defend. Now she is speaking out and taking her opposition to the president to a different level by deciding to run for Congress.
“I decided to leave because I opposed the policy and I opposed, specifically, the pressure that was being put on Zelensky, on the Ukrainians — and while we were letting the Russians off the hook,” Ms. Brink said in an interview on Tuesday, referring to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “I fully support pushing for an end to the war. But peace at any price is not peace, it’s appeasement. And history has showed us that appeasement only means more war.”
Ms. Brink said that the State Department made clear the dramatic switch in approach through the language it adopted after Mr. Trump took office in January. Instead of calling the full-scale invasion of 2022 and the continuing assault on Ukrainian cities “Russia’s brutal war of aggression,” as it previously did, the new wording was “the Russia-Ukraine war,” she noted. That, she said, was a false equivalence that defied reality.
“I couldn’t in any good conscience change the way I talk about it,” she said. “I tried to find ways that I could thread that needle. I did try. But I failed. It was impossible to do. And I realized that I couldn’t both serve my country the way I knew I had to do it to be consistent with the policy and stand by my own principles.”
Having spent the past nearly three years helping to defend a young democracy under attack, Ms. Brink said she has come home to help defend an older democracy she believes is at risk. On Wednesday, she will formally announce her campaign as a Democrat for a House seat in her home state of Michigan.
“It’s important to fight for democracy at home,” she said. “I fought for democracy and for freedom abroad for a long time, but I think right now we need people with principles to stand up and do everything they can so that we end up in a place that remembers who we are: a country based on freedom, democracy, rule of law.”
She is running in one of the most competitive House districts in the country, for a Lansing-based seat that was held by Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, before her election to the Senate last year. It is now held by Tom Barrett, a Republican who won with 50 percent of the vote in November. Other Democrats also have their eye on the race, which will likely attract tens of millions of dollars in next year’s midterm elections.
Ms. Brink, who grew up in Grand Rapids, may be an unlikely politician. In nearly three decades as a diplomat, she did tours of duty in Serbia, Cyprus, Georgia and Uzbekistan as well as stints at the State Department headquarters and on the staff of the National Security Council. Mr. Trump appointed her as ambassador to Slovakia in 2019.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sent her to Ukraine shortly after Russian forces invaded in 2022, and she ran a wartime embassy responsible for protecting American staff members while coordinating with the Ukrainian government as the United States set up an expansive pipeline of military aid. Among other things, she oversaw the largest U.S. Agency for International Development mission in the world before Mr. Trump dismantled the agency.
Her time in the region has given her a different view of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than Mr. Trump evinces. Unlike the American president, she said she does not believe that Mr. Putin is sincere about wanting peace. “I think he has no interest in ending the war,” she said. “What he wants is to keep the negotiations going so he can change the facts on the ground.”
But she said a “shadow of fear” has enveloped the diplomatic corps under Mr. Trump, discouraging professionals from offering any contrary views for fear of reprisal. “That’s very deeply concerning,” she said. “I think it puts our democracy at risk because our government and our civil servants, our public servants, are scared because they won’t speak up.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
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