Pentagon’s leading Ukraine expert departs

Laura Cooper, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr. participate in a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
Photo: Getty Images

A key player in coordinating U.S. military aid and marshaling international support for Ukraine has left the Pentagon just days before Donald Trump takes the White House and puts its own imprint on the war, POLITICO reports.

Laura Cooper, a career civil servant who led the Russia and Ukraine office since the first Trump administration, stepped down from her post just after the new year.

Cooper, who spent more than two decades at the Pentagon, is probably best known for testifying to Congress over the objections of department leadership as part of Trump’s Ukraine-related impeachment trial. The Defense Department didn’t say why Cooper left, but given her testimony and the uncertainty over Ukraine policy, the Pentagon might have proven an uncomfortable place for her under the new president.

Her departure reflects a growing sense of anxiety within the Defense Department over the incoming administration and how it plans to treat the ranks of career civil servants and military flag officers, particularly amid expectations Trump will downsize the federal workforce.

Cooper played an outsized role in coordinating the massive shipments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2022. But Pentagon and State Department officials who worked closely with her said they feared she would have a target on her back under Trump for her testimony and ties to Biden-era Ukraine policy.

Cooper was part of a class of federal officials who serve in administrations of both parties and are seen as the institutional brain behind massive bureaucracies. Unlike political appointees, civil servants are not expected to leave with a change of political leadership.

Cooper first made headlines in 2019 when she was called to testify in Congress on efforts by then-president Trump to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, his rival in the 2020 presidential election. Trump also faced allegations that he withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine as part of that push. The Senate acquitted Trump of those charges on mostly party-line votes.

Cooper developed a good rapport with many in the Ukrainian government while coordinating aid, and some of them would stop by her office at the Pentagon when visiting Washington, according to multiple Ukrainian officials.

Now it is over…

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