Luis Ayllón
The Spanish government has asked the Ukrainian authorities for the plácet to appoint diplomat Ricardo López-Aranda as its new ambassador to Kiev, The Diplomat has learned from reliable sources.
Once Volodimir Zelenski’s government has given the go-ahead, López-Aranda will replace Silvia Cortés, who had returned to the Ukrainian capital on 21 April as part of the entourage accompanying Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on his visit to the country. The ambassador had left Kiev on 25 February for Poland, together with the embassy staff and after having managed to bring together a hundred Spaniards living in the country the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in a convoy protected by members of the GEO of the National Police.
On the 8th, Silvia Cortés published two photographs on her Twitter account, accompanied by a text that read: “Proud to work for Spain helping our Ukrainian friends. Glory to Ukraine”. In one of the photographs, the ambassador could be seen in a working office, where the window was covered with sandbags. The other shows a mattress lying on the floor in what is presumed to be her bedroom in the laundry room in the basement of a hotel near the embassy’s offices.
Diplomatic sources consulted by The Diplomat believe that the publication of the tweet by the ambassador was a way of drawing attention to the conditions in which the diplomatic representation is located, for which, despite the decision to have the ambassador back on the ground, no special security measures have been adopted in view of the danger that she could be hit by Russian fire.
According to diplomatic sources quoted by El Debate, the tweet was preceded by a series of previous complaints made by the ambassador through the internal channels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In any case, the government seems to have opted for the replacement of Silvia Cortés, who, moreover, has been in a post since September 2017 in a position that had been put out to tender last December, along with some thirty other embassies, in what is known colloquially by diplomats as “embabombo”.
As a replacement for Silvia Cortés, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has chosen Ricardo López-Aranda, a diplomat who was ambassador to the Ivory Coast from July 2018 to September 2021 and who is currently in Washington developing a programme at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
A diplomat since 1997, López Aranda headed the Analysis and Forecasting Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation from 2014 to 2018. Previously, he was Deputy Representative to the Political and Security Committee of the EU and to the Western European Union; he worked in the International Department of the Presidency of the Government, was Deputy Director General of Foreign Policy and Common Security and was stationed at the Embassies in Managua and Pretoria.
