As US authorities became increasingly persuaded that Russia may invade Ukraine this month, they urged Americans to leave the country immediately – with a scary warning.

They said there would be no help for those who stayed behind.

President Biden hammered home the issue last week when he said he would not employ the military to rescue anyone caught in a Russian attack.

“All Americans should leave Ukraine,” he said on NBC News, adding that he couldn’t risk a fight with Russian troops, which could spark World War III.

Mr. Biden’s approach to the Ukraine crisis appears to have been shaped in multiple ways by the fallout from last summer’s chaotic evacuation of Americans from Afghanistan, from more explicit coordination with European allies, who in some cases felt left out of Afghanistan planning, to greater transparency about the direst intelligence assessments.

However, in Ukraine and elsewhere, US officials have focused on a more specific concern: that Americans in foreign danger zones will mistakenly believe that an Air Force C-17 cargo plane — such as those that moved thousands out of Afghanistan during the final days of the US withdrawal — will be their last resort escape option.

In recent warnings to Americans abroad, first in unstable Ethiopia and now in Ukraine, Biden officials have made it clear that the Afghanistan rescue effort was a one-time event.

“The United States does not typically do mass evacuations,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters last week. Lest anyone recall last summer’s events in Kabul, she pointed out that “the situation in Afghanistan was unique for many reasons.”

In her speech, Ms. Psaki was talking about the 16-day military evacuation from the Kabul airport that took place just before and after the Taliban took Afghanistan. Over 100,000 Afghans who supported the U.S. during its 20-year war in Afghanistan were also transported out of the country, along with their families.

The Biden administration declared the operation a success, despite facing harsh criticism for failing to foresee Afghanistan’s government’s rapid fall and failing to begin evacuations sooner. Some US officials expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that their repeated public requests for Americans to leave the country in the months leading up to the Taliban’s takeover were mostly ignored.

Since then, the president has seemed adamant about avoiding a recurrence of that operation, which was tragically punctuated by a suicide bombing on Aug. 26 that killed up to 170 people and 13 US Marines stationed at a gate outside Kabul airport.

“An invasion remains distinctly possible,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday in a national address. “That’s why I’ve asked several times that all Americans in Ukraine leave now before it’s too late to leave safely.” The president noted that this was also why he ordered the temporary move of the US embassy from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to Lviv, a city in western Ukraine near the country’s border with Poland.

As rebel troops moved on Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, Biden officials sent a similar, if less well recognized, message a few months before. The State Department began releasing near-daily announcements urging Americans to leave, citing analysts’ warnings of brutal urban conflict and a possible government collapse.

State Department officials clearly stressed that the Kabul airlift should not be interpreted as a precedent, as is the situation now in Ukraine.

“I think there may be a misperception that what we saw in Afghanistan is something that the U.S. government can undertake anywhere and everywhere in the world,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a news conference on Nov. 15, adding that no one “should expect that we may be in a position to undertake something similar to what we saw in Afghanistan.”

In recent days, the US has issued travel advisories for Belarus and Transnistria, a breakaway territory of Moldova that shares a border with Ukraine.

In October, the State Department estimated that roughly 6,600 Americans, many of them dual nationals, lived in Ukraine, along with an unknown number of tourists and travelers.

Former US ambassador to three countries, including Afghanistan, Ronald E. Neumann, said it would be tough to persuade Americans that they were on their own.

Mr. Neumann, who is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, said: “They don’t get out, and then they think the military’s going to come and get them.”

But, he admitted, it is one thing to talk about leaving Americans behind and quite another to do it. “Some congressman’s going to be screaming that you’ve got to find Mary Jo,” he said. “And you’ve got to do it, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Mr. Neumann did not pass judgment on the decision to relocate the Kyiv embassy, but he did point out that US ambassadors have risked their lives in the past to assist Americans in danger. He said that during World War II, embassy employees in France and Poland supported Americans even after German offensives had begun.

“Diplomats were going out in the middle of air raids to find Americans and bring them into embassies,” he said.

After the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, the US Embassy in Moscow kept a skeletal workforce there. (According to an official State Department account, the diplomats saved water by freezing it in garbage cans and attended the ballet “Swan Lake” nearly 50 times when they weren’t preparing for the siege.)

Image Credit: Getty

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