U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink is stepping down, the State Department confirmed Thursday, as the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokesperson, said Brink would be leaving her role, though she didn’t give a specific departure date. 

The news comes at a critical moment for U.S. foreign policy as officials work to ease tensions and end the grinding war in Eastern Europe.

Brink, a career diplomat with decades of experience, was nominated by then-President Joe Biden and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in May 2022, just months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

She became the first U.S. ambassador to serve in Kyiv since 2019, helping reestablish America’s diplomatic presence after embassy staff were evacuated in the early days of the war.

Before serving in Ukraine, Brink was the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia and worked in top roles at the National Security Council. She speaks Russian and is known for strongly defending U.S. interests in Eastern Europe.

While in Ukraine, Brink was a vocal supporter of American military aid and often appeared publicly with Ukrainian leaders. Her resignation comes as the Trump administration shifts focus toward ending the war through diplomacy and renewed talks with Russia.

Also on Thursday, U.S. and Russian officials held rare face-to-face talks in Istanbul aimed at repairing long-strained diplomatic relations. The State Department said the two sides exchanged formal notes to finalize an agreement that would stabilize banking services for each country’s embassies, a step seen as key to keeping diplomatic missions operational.

In recent years, both countries have imposed financial restrictions on each other’s embassies and slashed staffing due to the fallout from the war. A finalized banking deal could open the door to restoring some of those lost diplomatic connections.

The State Department said follow-up talks are expected, though no date has been set.

Brink’s departure lands at a moment of major transition in U.S. foreign policy. Her exit may also clear the way for a new ambassador more closely aligned with the Trump administration’s push for a ceasefire deal.

The State Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quipped that the Trump administration has wiped out ‘99.9%’ of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (DEI) from the military during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. 

President Donald Trump questioned Hegseth about whether the military had eradicated 100% of DEI efforts under his leadership, as Cabinet members shared updates on their own agencies’ attempts to purge such policies. 

‘99.9, sir – I’m going to get that last point,’ Hegseth said. 

The Trump administration has unveiled multiple initiatives to curb DEI initiatives within the military, including signing an executive order in January barring transgender people from enlisting and serving openly in the military. 

However, two federal judges issued nationwide injunctions in March blocking the Trump administration from enforcing the ban while the lawsuit is pending. In a judgment rendered on March 19, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of Washington, D.C., said the Trump administration’s order was ‘soaked in animus,’ and discriminated based on a person’s transgender status.

‘Indeed, the cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them,’ Reyes wrote in the decision.

Trump signed another executive order in January banning DEI content in K–12 schools that receive federal funds. While military service academies were originally exempt since they are not classified as K–12 institutions, the Pentagon issued instructions to the Naval Academy to remove DEI-related books from its library in March. 

Included in the list of nearly 400 books purged are ‘How to be Anti-Racist’ and ‘Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’ by Ibram X. Kendi, as well as ‘Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America,’ by former Georgia Rep. Stacey Abrams.

Kendi is the founding director emeritus of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He rose to national prominence following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Hegseth has made clear that the Pentagon will not tolerate any DEI initiatives under his watch. 

‘The President’s guidance (lawful orders) is clear: No more DEI at @DeptofDefense,’ Hegseth said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, in January. ‘The Pentagon will comply, immediately. No exceptions, name-changes, or delays.’ 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

China has been ramping up its military actions around Taiwan in what one top commander warned on Thursday are not just drills, but ‘rehearsals.’

‘China’s unprecedented aggression and military modernization poses a serious threat to the homeland, our allies and our partners,’ Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. ‘With military pressure against Taiwan increasing by 300%, China’s increasingly aggressive actions near Taiwan are not just exercises, they are rehearsals.’

Beijing has long looked to assert its dominance over Taiwan as it aims to ‘reunify’ the island with mainland China in a move the West and Taipei have warned is against Taiwan’s wishes and would disturb the region’s status quo.

Taiwan identifies as a sovereign nation. However, it is officially recognized by China, the United Nations and the U.S. as part of the ‘One China’ policy – though the U.S. has increasingly warned Beijing against disrupting regional stability by forcibly ‘reunifying’ the island with the mainland. 

‘While the [People’s Liberation Army] PLA attempts to intimidate the people of Taiwan and demonstrate coercive capabilities, these actions are backfiring, drawing increased global attention and accelerating Taiwan’s own defense preparations,’ Paparo said. 

But it is not only China’s military posture toward Taiwan that concerns top military commanders. 

‘China’s outproducing the United States in air missile, maritime and space capability and accelerating these,’ Paparo said. ‘I remain confident in our deterrence posture, but the trajectory must change.’

The Indo-Pacific commander warned that China is outstripping the U.S. in the production of fighters at a rate of 1.2 to 1, and warned that the U.S. is falling behind when it comes to shipbuilding, as well as some missile and space-based capabilities. 

‘They built combatants at the rate of 6 to 1.8 to the United States,’ Paparo told the lawmakers, in reference to China’s investment in producing ships, aircraft and weaponry. 

‘We’ve got to get at the problems of why we don’t have enough [of a] combat logistics force – and that’s shipbuilding. Why we don’t have enough labor,’ Paparo said. ‘And those are looking hard at pay and incentives in order to recruit and retain those people.’

A 2022 Defense Department report long withheld by the Biden administration has recently surfaced and reveals that seven U.S. service members showed COVID-19-like symptoms after having competed in the World Military Games in Wuhan, China, months before the deadly virus first broke out in the U.S.

The explosive disclosure suggests that the virus was circulating in Wuhan months before China disclosed it to the world in December 2019. The games took place in October 2019, two months earlier. 

It also challenges the Biden administration’s public claims in 2021 that there was no evidence that any American participants contracted the virus at those games. The CIA, FBI and Energy Department have all now suggested that the COVID-19 virus pandemic may have originated via a lab leak from the city’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The 2022 report was legally required to be released publicly online more than two years ago ‘in a searchable format,’ but it only became available some time in late March, when the Trump administration uploaded it to a Defense Department website, The Washington Free Beacon reported. 

The outlet reported that the Biden administration did send copies of the report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in December 2022, but the report was never made available online by the administration. 

The report found that of the 263 U.S. delegation that traveled to the event, seven U.S. members showed COVID-19-like symptoms between Oct. 18, 2019 and Jan. 21, 2020. All symptoms were resolved within six days and could be attributed to other respiratory illnesses​.

The report also found that there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19-like symptoms at Defense Department facilities after the athletes returned, although service members were not tested for COVID-19 or antibodies as testing was not available at that early stage of the pandemic.

However, Washington was one of the earliest states to show a spike in COVID-19, and the U.S. team used chartered flights to and from the games via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Prospect reported.

Then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told the Washington Post in June 2021 that the military had ‘no knowledge’ of any COVID-19 infections among the troops that participated in those games.

The Pentagon, during Trump’s first term, said in June 2020 that there was no reason to test members as the event was held ‘prior to the reported outbreak,’ Prospect reported. 

Other international athletes reported having come down with COVID-19-like symptoms, the Daily Mail reported in June 2021. 

The games have long been suspected as being a ‘super spreader’ event which took place close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health was conducting gain of function research there. 

‘Many of the athletes said ​Wuhan looked like a ‘ghost town’ in October‚ two months before China reported the first case of coronavirus there,’ the New York Post reported.

Former Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., in 2021 said that those months were critical and could have helped the United States understand the disease and ‘shut down travel earlier in order to stop the spread and ultimately save potentially millions of lives.’

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A Mexican drug lord was released from custody after being convicted in the 1985 killing of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena. 

Ernesto ‘Don Neto’ Fonseca Carrillo, one of the co-founders of the Guadalajara Cartel, was freed last weekend after completing his 40-year sentence, a federal agent confirmed to the Associated Press. 

Fonseca, 94, had been serving the remainder of his sentence under home confinement outside Mexico City since being moved from prison in 2016. The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday from Fox News Digital. 

Rafael Caro Quintero, another Guadalajara Cartel co-founder who also was convicted in the murder, was one of 29 cartel figures Mexico sent to the United States in February. It’s unclear if the U.S. is now looking to bring Fonseca into custody. 

At the time of his murder, the DEA and Camarena had been utilizing a series of wiretaps to make sizeable drug busts inside Mexico. 

In February 1985, as Camarena left to meet his wife for lunch outside the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, he was surrounded by officers from the DFS, a Mexican intelligence agency that no longer exists. 

‘Back in the middle 1980s, the DFS, their main role was to protect the drug lords,’ former DEA agent Hector Berrellez, who led the investigation into Camarena’s murder, told Fox News in 2013. 

The DFS agents then took Camarena, blindfolded and held at gunpoint, to one of Caro Quintero’s haciendas nearby. 

For more than 30 hours, Caro-Quintero and others interrogated Camarena and crushed his skull, jaw, nose and cheekbones with a tire iron. They broke his ribs, drilled a hole in his head and tortured him with a cattle prod. As Camarena lay dying, Caro-Quintero ordered a cartel doctor to keep the U.S. agent alive. 

The 37-year-old’s body was found dumped on a nearby ranch about a month later. 

In 2013, Caro Quintero walked free after serving 28 years in prison.  He was released after a court overturned his 40-year sentence for the kidnapping and killing of Camarena. 

Caro Quintero was arrested again by Mexican forces in July 2022 after he allegedly returned to drug trafficking. 

Fox News’ Greg Wehner, William La Jeunesse, Lee Ross and the Associated Press contributed to this report. 

— The Food and Drug Administration is phasing out an animal testing requirement for antibody therapies and other drugs in favor of testing on materials that mimic human organs, the FDA announced on Thursday. 

‘For too long, drug manufacturers have performed additional animal testing of drugs that have data in broad human use internationally. This initiative marks a paradigm shift in drug evaluation and holds promise to accelerate cures and meaningful treatments for Americans while reducing animal use,’ FDA Commissioner Martin A. Makary, said in comment provided to Fox News Digital. 

 ‘By leveraging AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data, we can get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably, while also reducing R&D costs and drug prices. It is a win-win for public health and ethics.’ 

The phase-out focuses on ending animal testing in regard to researching monoclonal antibody therapies, which are lab-made proteins meant to stimulate the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer, as well as other drugs, according to the press release. 

Instead, the FDA will encourage testing on ‘organoids,’ which are artificially grown masses of cells, according to the FDA’s press release obtained by Fox Digital. 

‘The FDA will promote the use of lab-grown human ‘organoids’ and organ-on-a-chip systems that mimic human organs – such as liver, heart, and immune organs – to test drug safety. These experiments can reveal toxic effects that could easily go undetected in animals, providing a more direct window into human responses,’ the press release says. 

The FDA will also encourage the use of AI while testing drugs, including building computer modeling that can predict a drug’s behavior, Fox Digital learned. 

The phase-out will include updating its guidelines to recognize research conducted on organoids and through AI.

‘Companies that submit strong safety data from non-animal tests may receive streamlined review, as the need for certain animal studies is eliminated, which would incentivize investment in modernized testing platforms,’ the FDA explained in its press release. 

The FDA is slated to also work with fellow federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Toxicology Program and the Department of Veterans Affairs, to ‘accelerate the validation’ of the new testing standards and will hold a public workshop later this year to further discuss the matter. 

‘For patients, it means a more efficient pipeline for novel treatments. It also means an added margin of safety, since human-based test systems may better predict real-world outcomes. For animal welfare, it represents a major step toward ending the use of laboratory animals in drug testing. Thousands of animals, including dogs and primates, could eventually be spared each year as these new methods take root,’ Makary said.