Marie Yovanovitch US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. Country: USA

Marie Louise (Masha) Yovanovitch - Biography

Marie Louise (Masha) Yovanovitch was born in Canada. Her paternal grandfather was Serbian, and her father, Michel Yovanovitch, was born in Chita shortly after the October Revolution in 1917 and managed to escape from a Nazi prisoner of war camp during World War II. After the same revolution in 1917, Yovanovitch's maternal grandfather fled from Russia to Germany, where her mother, Nadia, grew up. Yovanovitch's parents met after her mother left Germany. When Yovanovitch was three years old, her family moved from Canada to the United States. She grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Kent School in 1976, where her father taught French and Russian languages and her mother taught German.

In 1980, Yovanovitch graduated from Princeton University and the Pushkin Institute, earning bachelor's degrees in history and Russian studies. After university, she worked in the advertising industry in New York City. In 1986, Yovanovitch joined the diplomatic service and worked at U.S. embassies in Mogadishu (Somalia), London (United Kingdom), Moscow (Russia), and Ottawa (Canada). In May 1998, she was appointed Deputy Director of the Russia Desk at the U.S. Department of State. Two years later, she pursued further education at the National War College at the National Defense University, completing her studies in 2001 and earning a master's degree.

From August 2001 to June 2004, Yovanovitch served as the Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. During her time in Kiev, she became involved in an international scandal. In September 2002, Yovanovitch was the first to raise concerns about Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma's violation of sanctions imposed against Iraq - Ukraine allegedly sold radar systems to Saddam Hussein. This information came to light through an audio recording made by former President Kuchma's bodyguard, Major Mykola Melnychenko, in Kuchma's office and handed over to the Americans. Yovanovitch claimed that the U.S. had additional evidence of the deal. The scandal significantly deteriorated Ukrainian-American relations. In August 2004, Yovanovitch was appointed as the Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

On June 3, 2005, President George W. Bush, with the support of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, nominated Yovanovitch as the U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. On June 30, 2005, her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She took the helm of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Kyrgyzstan following the "Tulip Revolution," when President Askar Akayev resigned in March 2005 after a bloodless coup, and shortly before the presidential elections held on July 10, 2005, which resulted in the election of Kurmanbek Bakiyev as the new president of the republic.

According to some experts, Yovanovitch proved to be an ineffective head of the diplomatic mission. She was quite visible in the public eye, taking on the role of a narrator in Sergei Prokofiev's symphonic fairy tale "Peter and the Wolf" and becoming the godmother to the son of Kyrgyzstani judoka Larisa Mazur, whom she trained under. At the same time, Yovanovitch was considered a weak strategist, and Kyrgyzstani-American relations significantly worsened, to the point of the country possibly shifting away from U.S. influence. In April 2006, Yovanovitch proposed that Kyrgyzstan join the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, a program by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to help poor countries cope with external debt. This proposal faced opposition from some senior Kyrgyzstani officials and opposition representatives, who believed that it could effectively lead Kyrgyzstan under external control. Additionally, the important U.S. stronghold in Central Asia - the Peter Ganser Air Base - became a leverage point for pressure on the U.S. government. Kyrgyzstani authorities periodically demanded a significant increase in rent for the base, located at the Manas International Airport in Bishkek. After a Kyrgyzstani fuel truck driver, Alexander Ivanov, was shot by U.S. soldier Zachary Hatfield on December 6, 2006, discussions in the country shifted towards the possible change in status of U.S. military personnel with diplomatic immunity and the fate of the air base itself.

Yovanovitch is fluent in Russian and French, and in 2005, she began studying the Kyrgyz language.