Chrystia Freeland is leaving Mark Carney’s Cabinet to become a special envoy to Ukraine. Freeland, one of Canada’s most influential politicians for more than a decade, announced her exit Tuesday in Ottawa.

Shortly after, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Freeland will become Canada’s special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

“With tremendous gratitude and a little sadness, I have decided to step down,” Freeland said Tuesday in a letter posted on social media. “I do not intend to run in the next federal election.”

The four-term lawmaker said she plans to remain in the House as a member of Parliament.

“Chrystia’s versatility, raw intelligence, and principled leadership have served Canadians with distinction through extraordinary challenges and changes,” Carney said in a statement.

A Liberal source close to Freeland said conversations with the prime minister about her new role stretched more than a month.

Freeland had been serving as Carney’s transport minister and was also responsible for internal trade in Canada.

Her move comes days after a visit to Kyiv for the Yalta European Strategy conference with former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

Freeland’s decision to take on a more global role in support of Ukraine is a natural fit.

The former journalist is of Ukrainian descent and speaks the language fluently. She moves with ease in European circles, as comfortable in Davos as she is in Kyiv. She maintains a rolodex of thinkers on Russian and Ukrainian affairs.

In a 2024 interview with POLITICO, Freeland named among her informal advisers Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Pulitzer-winning historian Anne Applebaum, plus a long list of others that included ambassadors, academics, historians, a retired U.S. treasury secretary and a former World Bank president.

As a young exchange student in Ukraine, Freeland’s pro-democracy work attracted KGB attention, which gave her the code name “Frida” and targeted her with smear campaigns.

In Cabinet, she was often the loudest voice pressing for strong support of Ukraine against Russian aggression. In an interview with POLITICO last year, she declined to predict much about the day-to-day slog of the war with Russia. But she expressed certainty of one thing.

“I don’t know when this war will end, I don’t know what that ending will look like. But I have a very high degree of confidence that 10 years from now, Ukraine will be democratic and prosperous and free,” she said.

At the time, Freeland was her government’s primary voice on Ukrainian affairs.

“I am glad to be able to play a role in helping Ukraine fight the world’s fight for democracy. That’s a privilege for me, and my life history, with my experience of Ukraine and Russia, plus now being in government in Canada,” she told POLITICO. “Those things have combined to make it possible for me to pass the puck a little bit and get closer to the goal.”

Her move also comes at a time when peace talks have been imperiled by faltering negotiations brokered by the White House — a version of a pessimistic scenario she imagined two years earlier.

“My biggest fear for Ukraine, actually, is us,” Freeland told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2023. “I worry about … our collective ability to stay the course.”

Freeland left a high-profile journalism career to enter federal politics in 2013. Trudeau tapped her to be his international trade minister in his first Cabinet. She later moved to foreign affairs before taking on the dual roles of deputy prime minister and finance minister.

It was Freeland’s abrupt exit from those roles last December that signaled the end was nigh for Trudeau’s unpopular government.

Freeland said she found herself “at odds” with Trudeau over how to handle economic policy and Donald Trump’s tariff threats, which drove a wedge between them.

In her resignation letter, she warned that how Canada deals with Trump “will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer.”

Trump, who called Freeland a “nasty woman” after she helped lead North American trade talks during his first administration, celebrated her resignation from Cabinet last December: “She will not be missed!!!!”

Trudeau stepped down weeks later.

The former PM’s resignation triggered a leadership contest that drew Carney into the political arena. Freeland faced off against Carney, the godfather of her son, in a leadership race he handily won. By April, Carney had won a federal election — and Freeland was back in Cabinet.