When she made the courageous decision to participate in the impeachment inquiry-over the objections of the Trump administration-she earned the nation’s respect, and her dignified response to the president’s attacks won our hearts. Through it all, Yovanovitch tirelessly advocated for the Ukrainian people, while advancing U.S. Nowhere was Putin’s aggression clearer than in Ukraine, where Russia meddled in elections, launched cyberattacks, peddled misinformation, illegally annexed Crimea, invaded the Donbas, and attacked Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. But when Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled from her post and Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, found himself set upon by Trump, it became clear just how dangerously close to the edge America itself had strayed.

And she rose to the top of her profession in the crucible of the former USSR, where she saw how President Vladimir Putin adeptly exploited corrupt leaders in neighboring countries and undermined their developing democracies. She was an eyewitness to the 1993 constitutional crisis in Russia and the street fighting in Moscow. Born into a family that had survived Soviet and Nazi terror, she first saw the corrosive effect of corruption in Somalia while cutting her teeth as a diplomat in the male-dominated world of the 1980s State Department. Yet Yovanovitch was no stranger to instability and injustice. It was a time of chaos and pain, for her and for the nation. In the months that followed, she endured personal tragedy while simultaneously being pulled into the blinding lights of the first impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump. In the middle of her third ambassadorship-a rarity in the world of diplomacy-she was targeted by a smear campaign and abruptly recalled from her post in Kyiv, Ukraine. Marie Yovanovitch was at the height of her diplomatic career when it all came crashing down. ambassador to Ukraine-a pioneering diplomat who spent her career advancing democracy in the post-Soviet world, and who electrified the nation by speaking truth to power during the first impeachment of President Trump. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | An inspiring and urgent memoir by the former U.S.

Lessons from the edge a memoir