THE LIFELINE
THE WINE WAS TOO WARM FOR Kristina Kvien, the top U.S. envoy to Ukraine, so she stood up to get some ice cubes from a waiter at the bar. It was close to midnight in eastern Poland, the 11th night of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for Kvien it was the end of a long day of meetings with U.S. military brass, members of Congress, and senior Biden Administration officials. Her boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, had left the city of Rzeszow a few hours earlier after visiting the U.S. supply lines to Ukraine. Kvien had gone to see him off.
“It’s been crazy here,” she told me that night in the restaurant of a hotel in the city center, which has served as her team’s headquarters since U.S. diplomats evacuated Ukraine. “A couple of days ago, I was sitting at this table with Sean Penn.” The American actor, who was working on a film in Ukraine when the invasion started, had been forced to flee over the border, abandoning his car at the side of the road and walking into Poland with a flood of refugees. Kvien ran into him when he finally made it to the hotel. “It feels a bit like Casablanca,” she says.
Spend a few days driving back and forth across this border, and the plot of that wartime classic comes readily to mind. The film premiered in 1942, less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the U.S. to join World War II. Eighty years later, the U.S. again finds itself drawn into a major European war, and there is no better place to witness its
