With acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor set to leave his post in January, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton is being touted as the next U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
According to Politico, U.S. President Donald J. Trump “likes Dayton,” citing a U.S. Senate aide, who also told the Washington, D.C.-based news outlet that the former general is willing to take the job. He has recent familiarity with the nation. In November 2018, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis appointed Dayton as the senior U.S. defense advisor to Ukraine.
The Kyiv Post could not get confirmation from anyone at the U.S. State Department nor was able to immediately reach Dayton, who is a 40-year Army veteran serving as director of the Pentagon-affiliated George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany.
Additionally, in a bid to shore up Ukraine-U.S. relations badly battered by the Trump impeachment scandal, Politico also is reporting that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is devoting more time to Ukraine and will visit Kyiv next month. It will be Pompeo’s first trip to Ukraine as America’s top diplomat.
Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador, replacing the fired Marie L. Yovanovitch, will have to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, a process that could take months, leaving the U.S. mission without an official ambassador since Yovanovitch left in May.
According to his biography on the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Dayton “is responsible for orchestrating resident courses, outreach programs and an international and interagency network of about 14,000 government officials from 156 nations in fields of international security studies, defense and foreign affairs.”
Dayton retired from the U.S. Army on Dec. 1, 2010, as a lieutenant general, according to the biography, with his last assignment as U.S. security coordinator to Israel and Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem.
Dayton also studied at the U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch, Germany, a southern Bavarian city of 26,500 people, according to the center. He has a bachelor of arts degree in history from the College of William and Mary, a master’s degree in history from Cambridge University, and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Southern California. He speaks Russian and some German. He also served as U.S. defense attache in Moscow.
Khatia Dekanoidze, who served for a year as National Police chief in Ukraine until 2016, worked as an adjunct professor at the German Marshall Fund in Garmisch, and met Dayton several times, calling him “an amazing man, very decent.” She said he’d be an excellent choice for the job. But Dekanoidze stressed that she has no official confirmation that Dayton will be appointed, although she’s heard the rumors of his appointment from “lots of sources.”
“He was an excellent general with all the high standards of the military. He was defense attache in Moscow. He served in hotspots in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Dekanoidze said. “He’s very good at security and military issues. I hope if he’s approved, he will be a great ambassador. I heard the approval process will be very long now.”
Dekanoidze, who now works as a consultant on political, public affairs and legal issues in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, said that she hopes Dayton as ambassador “can influence in positive ways” the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, strained by Trump’s looming impeachment.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives appears poised to impeach Trump for abuse of office and obstruction charges. It’s part of the ongoing probe over whether the American leader withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine and a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky unless his Ukrainian counterpart ordered an investigation of ex-U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and into whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
