Wartime Diplomacy. Memories of German Ambassador to Ukraine about One-Year Work at War

Anka Feldhusen, who heads the German embassy, is probably the most experienced Western ambassador when it comes to Ukrainian issues. She is fluent in Ukrainian and already has her third posting to Kyiv.

In particular, no other European ambassador has the experience of working in Ukraine both during the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014 and in 2022.

Ahead of the anniversary of the great Russian attack, Anka Feldhusen has shared her memories of the events leading up to the Russian attack, the first days, and how the Western powers adjusted their work under war conditions.

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The beginning of Russia‘s full-blown war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24 came in a totally different way for me than the invasion of Crimea in February 2014 and the real beginning of the war in Donbas in summer 2014.

I was in Ukraine on both occasions, but it felt very different. In 2014, the war crept into our diplomatic life little by little and the German Embassy never changed its posture. Military operations seemed to be far away, normal democratic free elections were held, the Association Agreement with the EU was signed and ultimately ratified. Germany supported Ukraine in every way, except with weapons.

In 2022 the war was probably the most announced war ever. We at the Germany Embassy had prepared for it for weeks, and on February 12 decided to send families home and to keep very reduced core teams in Kyiv and Lviv. Many other Embassies had already left to Lviv or Poland.

Berlin, as all our headquarters, was worried, but life in Kyiv went on completely normally. Even the weather reminded me of February 2014 when we also had gorgeous sunshine during the worst days of the Revolution of Dignity.

When we received instructions during the night of February 23/24 to leave Kyiv, 

we still had hopes nothing would happen.

We went through our drill, but since evacuation orders had come late in the evening, we were all tired and I decided to have the team sleep a few hours in a hotel in Zhytomyr. If again this was a false alarm, so I reasoned, we would have been able to go back to Kyiv where I had an appointment with the Finance Minister on February 24 to sign the contract to disburse the last €150 Mio out of €500 Mio promised earlier.

But my defense attaché woke me around 5.30 with the news that a cruise missile had just flown over our hotel and hit a nearby military airport.

An hour later we were on the road again, going south by secondary roads towards Lviv. For the first time we were stopped in a little village where the local policeman was obviously unsure how to deal with our convoy of twelve cars.

Eventually he let us go, and the sweets he gave me as he said good bye (I must have looked really drained) are still in my handbag as a memory of human kindness in these first mind-numbing hours of the war.

We were stopped once more at a big checkpoint and I had to talk to the head of the National Police to get us through, but after that we passed all the checkpoints without any problem.

The rest of the day went by in a kind of a fog. Missiles were flying everywhere, so we decided to go to Poland directly and not to stop in Lviv as we had planned to do. The line at the border crossing point Rava-Ruska was long, but nothing compared to what was to follow in the next days.

Still, people were upset seeing our convoy skip the line, and more than once I had to mediate between angry drivers. By 6 ЗЬ we were in Poland, where our Warsaw Embassy had booked us hotel rooms in Zamość.

It took us a day to further reduce the team and send those colleagues with cars and embassy equipment to Berlin. Eight of us stayed in Poland, 6 weeks in Zamość, 4 weeks in Rzeszow, where most of the other embassies had relocated to.

During the first days I would wake up very early and grab my phone to make sure Kyiv was still in Ukrainian hands. When the Russian forces had not taken it after around a week I became more hopeful for the first time, believing that the capital, this symbolic place, with the President and the Government present there, would withstand.

My team and I tried to reorganize our work. After having taken care of local staff fleeing through Zamość and having them settled in Germany or elsewhere, we reconnected with contacts inside Ukraine.

Our defense attaché tracked the military operations. My deputy put his heart into helping German parents of surrogate babies, born just before the war, to help to get them travel documents and to bring them to safety – with the magnificent help of the border guard team at Rava-Ruska border crossing point. G7 coordination meetings started again.

Two colleagues looked for office space so that we could get out of our hotel rooms. The Mayor of Zamość very generously let us have two rooms in his Renaissance town hall, complimentary water and cookies included daily. My deputy organized a concert on the beautiful market square in August 2022 to say thank you to the hospitable people of Zamość.

But after the first chaotic weeks and with all local staff in- and outside Ukraine accounted for we all started to feel miserable,

just as the rest of our German colleagues who had had to go back to Germany already in mid-February. All we wanted to do was to help Ukraine against the Russian aggressor and doing that from a hotel room in pretty towns in Eastern Poland where life just went on almost normally seemed increasingly weird.

We had just moved to Rzeszow to be with the other Embassies when the first colleagues were allowed back to Kyiv around Easter.

I remember being so jealous of my friend Matti Maasikas, who was one of the first. Even though spring was slowly coming and I tried to see a bit of the surrounding towns and the Polish part of the Carpathian mountains, all I wanted was to go back to Kyiv.

Eventually, my ambassador friends from Great Britain, Canada and the US, who had left Kyiv before me, were also back there before me. Uplifting moments in those last weeks in Rzeszow were the sight of an Antonov 124 bringing in weapons and tons of ammunition and chats with their Ukrainian crew; the medevac flights going out every Thursday by an Airbus of the German Airforce; the decision to deliver Panzerhaubitzen 2000 to Ukraine and our weekend quest for interpreters so that they could start the training in Germany in time. Anything that would help concretely!

On May 9, 2022 I finally boarded a night train to Kyiv in the delegation of my Foreign Minister. On May 10 I woke up somewhere near Fastiv. I had never felt better since February 24.

My very, very small team drove in that very same day with a large security component and in late afternoon of May 10^th, 2022, my Minister reopened our diplomatic presence in Kyiv. The few of us who were present, watched, close to tears. The Minister left in the evening and a new part of our war life began.

The best about it was to be able to reunite with our local staff who had remained in Kyiv or came back when they heard that the Embassy was open again.

The driver who had guarded the Embassy building since February 24 from his diggings in the Embassy garage and had given us daily updates. And so many others.

We needed their help badly, since we were only me plus four more diplomats in the beginning, rotating on a six-week schedule. More delegations came, culminating with the visit of the Federal Chancellor, together with the French, the Italian and the Romanian presidents.

When they announced their support for Ukraine’s request to membership to the EU in the garden of Mariinsky Palace it felt like a historic moment.

All the while we learned to live with frequent air alarms, long hours in the hotel shelter or the Embassy basement, got to know the room-in-room concept while sleeping in our hotel bathrooms on the floor. And I got used to being accompanied everywhere by our German bodyguards.

The opera opened again on May 21, I started running again with my Finnish colleague and

summer in Kyiv felt almost like the ones pre-war.

A certain routine had set in, and I even took my first trip outside Kyiv to the little town of Koryukivka where the Federal President had gone in October 2021. Germans had killed almost the entire population of 7000 in 1943, and since my first visit in 2013 I had felt a special responsibility for that town. It was a shock to see all those bridges destroyed in Chernihiv region.

And to drive through the devastated neighborhoods in the town of Chernihiv and its outskirts.

Before I had only been to Odesa on a special train for the G7 in order to witness the beginning of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Our Minister of Defense visited Odesa on October 1 and it was great to be in that beautiful seaside town twice that summer.

In the meantime, we had managed to increase the number of diplomats in Kyiv and we were now doing 6 (or 4) weeks in, 2 weeks out. We were even hopeful to increase the number again, when the first massive missile strike on Kyiv happened on October 10. This set back the up-scaling of our embassy presence and to this day nothing has changed, as the missile strikes continue.

The delivery of our first IRIS-T air defense system coincided with the first missile and drone strikes and since then, air defense has been a priority for all of Ukraine’s partners.
For us diplomats the regular strikes mean regular visits to the shelter again. But we have managed to improve conditions there a lot, so that life and work can continue underground pretty much normally.

Very soon, delegations started to arrive again, too. Federal President Steinmeier visited Koryukivka almost exactly one year after his first trip. His discussion with local residents took place in the basement of the city’s town hall, air alarm starting just when Steinmeier had honored the victims of 1943.

On the way back to Kyiv, he stopped in Yahidne, where Russian troops had kept the local residents for a whole month in a dark and damp basement under the school they had turned into their HQ. We were all very pale when we came out again, shocked by the inhumanity of the aggressor.

Our visitors ventured further from Kyiv in the following months: the German Foreign Minister to Kharkiv on the invitation of her counterpart Dmytro Kuleba, putting back that city on the diplomatic map, as he said, since Annalena Baerbock was the first high-ranking foreign visitor to go that far East.

All these visits were and keep being possible by the extraordinary work of Ukrzaliznytsya. Their trains manage to make up lost time (unheard of in Germany…) and they always have special presents for their guests, bouquets of irises or leopards made of bone china….

Speaking of leopards: the tank debate and its positive outcome were reflected in such creative memes and other social media contributions that we collected them to remember!

I continue to visit projects that highlight Germany’s assistance in all sectors during this war, but already with a perspective towards rebuilding, too.

I speak to the Ukrainian leadership, to Ukrainian media and civil society and am thankful every day to my Ukrainian teachers who made it possible for me to converse freely in the language of my host country.

December 31 saw the end of the German G7 presidency that had taken up a lot of time for our team. I happily handed the baton over to my Japanese colleague Matsuda Kuninori on a day without light, water and heating.

I spent Christmas and New Year in Kyiv, with a core team of enthusiast diplomats and many Ukrainian friends. We had a Christmas tree in the Embassy and invited retired local staff for an afternoon of stollen, cookies and Glühwein. I managed to feed my team a huge Ukrainian turkey on Christmas Eve despite frequent power cuts in those weeks.

During these dark winter weeks and with the full-blown war lasting already almost a year, my team and I take courage from the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian people. We are grateful to the Ukrainian armed forces who defend their country and by doing so defend the rest of Europe as well. We share Ukraine’s grief over too many lost children, women and men. Germany, and my Embassy team in particular, will #StandWithUkraine.

Author: Anka Feldhusen,
Ambassador of Germany to Ukraine

Full version will be published in the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine book "Standing with Ukraine: Diplomatic View".