'There are audio and video recordings,' former Pentagon official: Yuri Kim involved in personal scandals

Former Pentagon official Michael Rubin has spoken about Yuri Kim, former United States ambassador to Albania.

During an interview for Syri TV, according to him, Yuri Kim's name has been frequently mentioned in various contexts, mostly not positive, during her period in office and beyond.

He has raised concerns about her perception in international circles, including reports of personal scandals. Among other things, Rubin noted that Yuri Kim's actions have often had a direct impact on how she is viewed by colleagues and the countries where she has served.

" As part of my work, I spend a lot of time abroad, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, but I also spend time in other countries, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Asia.

During my discussions and research in these areas, I meet with American diplomats. As an American, I am not part of the American government, however, I do not just have a simple informal conversation, but I can also have an informal discussion over a beer and talk about what is going on.

I have a lot of friends from college who are American diplomats. They are about the same age as Yuri Kim and we have mutual friends.

So, as a policy analyst in Washington, D.C., I also try to understand what's going on in the State Department and how that might affect American policies, because when it comes to foreign policy, there are two sides: there's the American side and there's also that other side, or that other side that Americans are involved with.

What has surprised me during my time working in Washington, but also during my travels in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean, has been that the name Yuri Kim has come up in a variety of contexts. Very often, they have not been positive.

The last point I want to make is that after Yuri Kim had left Albania, at that very moment, I did not know all the details of her period when she had been ambassador here.

Then Yuri Kim made headlines, where she testified before Congress, before the invasion of Azerbaijan by Nagorno-Karabakh, and she stood there before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which deals with foreign policy and is the highest representative. She said that under no circumstances would we allow the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh.

After 4 years, Azerbaijan carried out an ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and people were looking at Yuri Kim and saying how he could have made such a grave mistake.

What many people said behind the scenes at the State Department, her colleagues, was that Yuri Kim was so ambitious that she wanted to become the United States ambassador to Turkey, that she allowed exactly what she said to define her behavior, not only as acting assistant secretary, but also during her ten-year tenure as ambassador to Albania.

The reason why she did not become ambassador to Turkey is that there are two types of ambassadors in the State Department: there are career ambassadors who have also served in Albania and Yuri Kim is a member of the American Foreign Service, but there are also presidential assistants, people who have assisted the president.

Turkey has traditionally been a country where the ambassador in Ankara, like the US ambassador in Tirana, came from professional foreign service, but during the last Joe Biden administration, this changed, becoming simply a political appointment.

Joe Biden nominated a former senator from Arizona, Jeff Blake, and he nominated him because he wanted to express his thanks to Jeff Blake.

"I don't just meet with American or Korean officials, I also meet with academics, and what I learned was how Koreans view American politics. Many people told me that when Yuri Kim was a young aide, when she was an assistant, she would go to Korea and the Koreans would mention her name without knowing that I knew her and tell me that she had some personal scandals . But I won't go into detail about that, and the Koreans had audio and video recordings of these scandals," he said.