How US secretary of state Antony Blinken became a major player in the Ukraine war

When secretary of state Antony Blinken made a personal appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky, hoping to convince him that a Russian invasion was imminent, Ukraine’s president didn’t believe him.

The warning lacked specificity, Zelensky recalled in an interview after the invasion. Moreover, if the Americans truly believed the situation was as dire as Blinken intimated, why hadn’t they begun to send more powerful weapons months sooner?

This discreet meeting, occurring on the sidelines of a climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021, revealed the limitations of Blinken’s influence over the Ukrainian leader and Zelensky’s innate scepticism of US intelligence. But in the time since, Blinken’s rapport with Zelensky and his top aides has evolved substantially, and the top US diplomat has become one of Kyiv’s most trusted champions and interlocutors.