Olha Stefanishyna considers the legitimisation of Russia’s presence in the United States to be a new and perhaps the most difficult challenge in the context of diplomatic service.
“On my way here, I watched Kirill Dmitriev’s very complimentary appearance on Fox News prime time. He talked about Russian minerals, the attractiveness of the Russian economy, and investments. And this is against the backdrop of the Russian Federation’s ambassador returning to the United States and Russian churches opening. In other words, reality has changed not only in the context of public communication by the American administration and the role of the United States in ending the war. The new reality also concerns the legitimisation of Russia and the Russian presence. And we are not just talking about Alaska,” Stefanishyna notes.
In addition, she highlighted Russia’s attempts to resolve issues quietly under the guise of public manipulation. According to her, everything that Russia is doing around the negotiations – whether the meeting will be bilateral or trilateral, whether it will be in Moscow or perhaps in Beijing – is merely a public smokescreen to achieve results even before the peace talks and the meeting.
“While we as a country are waiting for the war to end and want peace more than anyone else in the world, believe in it, hope for it, and are making every effort to achieve it, for Russia it is just a pretext to resolve its issues along the way,” notes Olha Stefanishyna. “The meeting in Alaska is a pretext for participating in events that took place in Beijing [where the Russian president took part in a military parade and discussed strengthening cooperation with China and North Korea].”
In general, the ambassador describes the diplomatic front that is now opening up in the American direction as “a cold war in its most real dimension in the 21st
At the same time, Olha Stefanishyna believes that any agreements between Ukraine and the United States today offer a significant window of opportunity. The Ukrainian side plans to agree on the protection of American investments in the trade sector, similar to the agreements provided for in the mineral agreement.
“I met with American companies, and through simple manipulations and discussions, we came to the conclusion that every euro is very strongly protected – by a memorandum and commitments ratified by parliament. Before that, we did not need to protect every American dollar. And this reality is already changing,” says Stefanishyna.
She considers the main focus of her work as ambassador to be on Ukrainian issues, without attempting to solve all global problems.
“We must understand the intentions of each player who, in one way or another, has a role to play in ending the war in Ukraine and rebuilding Ukraine, but we cannot solve everything and save everyone.
We must ensure that, regardless of how events unfold, European countries can purchase American weapons and that they are sold to Ukraine,” the newly appointed ambassador emphasised.
She considers this issue resolved, and work is now underway at the coordination level to “define the role of each player, because NATO also wants to play a certain role.”
“Last year, we created a special mission responsible for coordination, planning, and logistics, so the entire foundation is in place. When we created this mission, we thought we had anticipated everything, but we hadn’t. We did not foresee that it would be involved in financing and managing funds for the purchase of this weaponry, so this component is being finalised,” Olha Stefanishyna explained.
“Similarly, after several conversations between our president and President Trump, a decision was finally made to allow the sale of American weapons. It is a matter of time and coordination before this agreement is finalised. Here I can quote Mark Rutte, who said that ‘money is not a problem.’ That is, negotiations with the President of the United States during the summit in The Hague and after that were structured in such a way that the American side could not get involved in a discussion about who paid more.
The European Union came to the United States with the position that money is not a problem, give us weapons. Therefore, I hope that my work on the European front will help to better coordinate with partners in Washington,” she added.
The second important point, according to her, is security guarantees.
“Yesterday (8 September – Ed.), incidentally, Andriy Yermak had a conversation with Secretary of State Rubio. An important aspect of this conversation for me was that Rubio confirmed that agreements on security guarantees have already been formulated in a certain way, and this is a decision that can be made regardless of agreements with the Russian Federation,” Stefanishyna said.
She refused to disclose details but stressed that this is already a reality.
“All further steps to end the war will depend on what this agreement will be and how quickly it will be implemented,” the new Ukrainian ambassador to the United States noted.