Penny Pritzker exits at pivotal moment for Ukraine’s recovery

U.S. and Ukrainian officials are working to reorient how Ukraine is handling its recovery in order to insulate it from political changes in both Washington and Kyiv without a key player: Penny Pritzker, President Biden’s special envoy for Ukraine’s reconstruction.

Pritzker only planned to serve a one-year term, which ended this month. But her impact over that time is described as monumental. 

“We always had, as they call it, Chicago style of doing things,” Ukraine Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin said in a brief interview with The Hill, while he described working with Pritzker.

Pritzker, born and raised in Chicago, is a billionaire heiress who served as secretary of Commerce during the Obama administration. Her family fled Ukraine in the late 19th century from the violence of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the Russian empire. 

“Being short, being accurate, being exact, being straightforward is the way we do business,” Kamyshin said, describing Pritzker and explaining how they worked in their first meeting. 

“She gets s‑‑‑ done,” said one Biden administration official, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak to the press. 

“She is very direct, she is to the point, and she's very much goal-oriented, which is to say, she's no nonsense, and she identifies the problem, and then she solves it,” said Ben Harris, who worked with Pritzker during the Obama administration and is vice president and director of the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Ukraine’s ability to revive, sustain and grow its economy is essential for the country to survive Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression.

Part of Putin’s strategy is to grind down Ukrainian resolve, resources and international support through a drawn-out war of attrition.

And while Ukraine has shocked Russia by launching a surprise incursion over the border in the Kursk region earlier this month, the country still suffers under aerial attacks on its civilian and energy infrastructure and has made little advancements along the roughly 620-mile front line. 

“There is a saying that armies win battles, but economies win wars,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said at an event in April.

Pritzker is being succeeded by Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma, a former ambassador to India and veteran Washington national security hand. A lawyer, Verma worked as chief legal officer and head of global public policy for Mastercard and as vice chair of The Asia Group consulting firm, among other roles.

Pritzker’s contribution over the past year is hard to overstate, Kamyshin said. “She was always the one who could pick up the phone and make the right talk with anyone in U.S. and as well as Ukraine. So for the new special representative it would be quite a challenge to over perform.”

Kamyshin, who has a hairstyle with shaved sides and a long, black braid running down his back, is leading his country’s effort to become a powerhouse of military production — both to supply its forces in Ukraine and serve as an arsenal for NATO, which it seeks to join. 

In July, on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Ukraine and Northrop Grumman signed a deal to produce medium-caliber ammunition — a landmark agreement that both Ukrainian and U.S. officials viewed as laying the groundwork for more co-production deals. 

Later that month, Boeing Defense signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ukraine’s state-owned aircraft manufacturing company Antonov to collaborate on aerial drones. 

Pritzker, speaking at the Brookings Institution on July 31, described the pace of defense deals as unheard of. 

“The defense team has four or five deals that they're getting done in less than six months, I mean this is just like — you don't do defense deals in that period of time,” she said. 

Kamyshin described those successes as part of Pritzker’s no-nonsense approach to deal making. 

“[Secretary] Pritzker was always helpful, and she was not only helpful with pushing things but she was also helpful when we couldn’t understand some things why they don’t happen,” he said.

During her speech at the Brookings Institution late last month, Pritzker laid out a five-point plan for Ukraine’s economic recovery. 

The plan includes Kyiv creating a government mechanism that decides which reconstruction and infrastructure projects should be prioritized, such as protecting energy infrastructure that Russia has sought to destroy.

Pritzker also called for Ukraine to do more to stop corruption, acknowledging Kyiv had passed a “bevy of tough reforms” but saying it needed to keep up the momentum. 

“We support Penny’s view on further steps,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Development Yulia Svyrydenko wrote in a statement to The Hill.  

Harris, of Brookings, described it as a speech that called for the country to shift from a reliance on donors to a focus on attracting business and capital. 

“I don't know if that was the intention, was to insulate it from political shifts, but I will say it feels like the plan was insulated from political shifts,” he said. “So you could imagine this plan being implemented regardless of who wins the 2024 U.S. presidential election.” 

Whether Vice President Harris or former President Trump ends up in the White House, U.S. support for Ukraine is under strain, in particular economic assistance. 

While Congress has passed five emergency supplemental aid packages for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, support has dropped with each vote — in particular among the GOP — and there’s little expectation that a sixth package will materialize before the end of the 118th Congress in January 2025. 

Even among Republicans who support Ukraine, very few want to prioritize economic assistance.

"We can do two things at the same time, but we just have to make sure we prioritize them accordingly,” said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank viewed as a key advocate for supporting Ukraine among an increasingly skeptical Republican Party. 

“I understand that the secretary has a job to do, and she's been tasked with economic recovery, but to me, we should focus less on this and more on winning the war.” 

Harris noted that Pritzker said in her speech that reconstruction can happen before the war ends, underscoring its urgency.

“There's no guarantee this war will be over anytime soon. I mean, some wars last for decades. I hope this one doesn't obviously,” he said. 

“This war has not transpired the way we expected. We thought this was a war that was going to last a few weeks, and here we are a few years later, with no end in sight — and Ukraine actually making advances into Russia — which is something that no one had predicted. So clearly, you can't predict what's going to happen.”