.
This is just unreal. It’s not that the U.S. Embassy, Kiev, was evacuated and relocated to Lvov in northwest Ukraine, near the Polish border. “Relocated” implies it’s still functioning and open for business.
In fact, the Embassy—now in Lvov—has no known address in Lvov. This is confirmed by local media in-country. At this time, the embassy is not located anywhere that anyone knows about. The new address (if any) is certainly not given on the (Kiev) website.
As for their telephone presence: I called the main number off the (Kiev) website, and it’s clear the switchboard is not working. There is a brief message from some State Department dork saying, “The embassy is open!”, then a weird beep followed by a long, poor-quality-audio message in Ukrainian, specifying their work hours and providing another number (which doesn’t work) to call for consular services. At the end of this message, you get transferred to what seems to be a live Ukrainian female, but she only has time to say hello before it kicks back and starts the message all over again. Every time. That poor lady must feel really dumb.
Seeing as they claim to have destroyed the Embassy phone system before pulling out (can’t have that Chinese stuff falling into Russian hands, LOL), this is probably some ad-hoc, off-site, local contract service… and it doesn’t work.
It’s clear, we have no functioning embassy in the Ukraine.
Perhaps they have not yet found a suitable space, however, they’ve been hyping a Russian invasion for months already, and in fact, they’ve been propping up the Ukraine to fight Russia for the last eight years—you’d think they would have figured something out. You’d think the Ukrainian government or even the Lvov municipality could set them up with an empty school or some community building.
(After the 2014 revolution in Kiev, they wasted no time, sending an “advance team” of officers to the Crimea to scope out various options—including an old school—for NATO office space in Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet under a lease agreement with the Ukraine, before Russia moved in and took back the peninsula. The school in question literally overlooked the bay where some Russian ships are parked. Yes, “they” can be aggressive, they can shop for real estate and ink a lease within days if they want to.)
What this means for Americans in the Ukraine is there is nowhere to go for help. Even if it’s something “mundane”, such as, you got drunk, lost your wallet, woke up in another town with one kidney missing, and you need someone to help you call your dad to ask him to wire you some more money—there’s no one to call.
Brandon’s people want to avoid being blamed for another “last days of Kabul” situation so badly, they have washed their hands of this miserable country and any Americans in it. I mean, you can’t blame them if they’re not in the picture, right? They are in hiding!
(Incidentally, all Ukrainians—including the army—can see this, and it looks horrible. For eight years, Uncle Sam has been their papa bear, sugar daddy, and Lord Protector, and now—while still sending weapons so that the natives may kill and die for his Grand Designs—he has simply run away. I can’t overstate how demoralizing this is—why have Republicans not picked up on it?)
Also of interest, according to multiple media sources in-country, all American diplomats in Lvov are now living in various hotels and are not seeking more permanent housing; no one is looking for an apartment. According to one source, some have shared that they anticipate coming back to Kiev soon enough. Yeah, of course they do—after the threat of another “last days of Kabul” has passed!
As you can see, everything they do is “political.” (If you didn’t already know that, by watching Grand Moff Tarkin Merrick Garland in action.)
I don’t see any reason now, not to file Articles of Impeachment against Secretary of State Blinken, on grounds of dereliction of duty at a minimum.
File now, wait until the midterms and then proceed from there. At least, get the concerns out in the open. Are congressional Republicans up for that?
No, they don’t seem to be. I might have missed something, but I haven’t heard one GOP senator talk about the embassy. Instead, they’re all still playing the role of lobotomized automatons and slaves of their defense contractor campaign donors, talking “Putin bad, Putin bad, we must stand up for the Ukraine.” How about they stand up for American citizens in the Ukraine?
Although there is seldom much of a choice, I suppose we get what we vote for.
P.S. “Do not try and find the embassy, that is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no embassy” (weird monk kid from the Matrix, Ukrainian edition.)
P.P.S. To be clear, I don’t know that the 2014 “advance team” to Crimea was sent by the U.S. military directly. It may have been a mission from NATO headquarters in Belgium.
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Update: Nomad Embassy (A Depraved Tale of Terror)
February 22. 2022
So it wasn’t enough that Brandon/Kombucha had U.S. Embassy, Kiev staff hiding out—with no embassy, no address, no working phone switchboard, no operations, no public communications, nothing—in Lvov, a nice, pretty, clean and relatively safe city near the Polish border, about 500 miles from the nearest Russian border, 100 miles from Belarus, and in a very “hostile” (to Russia) area of absolutely no military, political, or economic interest to Russia at all. It wasn’t enough.
So, as of yesterday, our nomad non-embassy fled again, this time, across the border into Poland. They’re all in Poland now. The American retreat from the Ukraine is now complete. They’ve washed their hands of it, and now, what do you know, they can’t be blamed for any botched evacuations or anything along “Afghanistan” lines. How can they be, when—officially, at least, that anyone knows about—there’s not one U.S. diplomatic or consular staffer in all the Ukraine?
However: Their Twitter is still active, go figure! Today, they posted a collage of photos of Kiev’s ancient churches, with the year of construction for each, juxtaposed against pictures of a forest, with the captions “Moscow” with those same years.
Leaving aside that those churches—as they exist today, in stone—were not built until centuries after the dates of founding of the wooden churches (destroyed by the Mongols) as given in the tweet… There’s the fact that (as pointed out by Jack Posobiec) Russians consider their civilization to have begun in Kiev, and Kiev has always been known as “the mother of Russian cities.” So, this isn’t exactly “trolling”—it’s just history.
Seeing as no embassy tweet would be posted without approval from a State Department “political” career track officer—the elite of the five career tracks—this really shows the low intellectual level at State today. Evidently, it’s no longer an “aristocracy”, it’s just another Government agency.
Personally, I’m not surprised. The one time a grown man (or any adult) ever peed on me, was in a bathroom at State’s Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, where I was taking two weeks of classes on Arab culture and politics in 2005. I won’t go into detail other than to say, I was so shocked, I didn’t clock the State soy-boy (I was in my fitness prime; he was taller but a runt.) I wandered out looking for a security guard but couldn’t find any. I went back to see if I could get another look at the fool to identify him better, but he was gone.
Today, he’s probably managing some embassy Twitter account.
In the words of Trump, “they’re not sending their best.”
