In the summer of 2018, an American evangelical pastor and dozens of Ukrainian Christian groups prayed for Marie Yovanovitch to be fired from her job as the US ambassador to Kyiv. With their prayers still unanswered a few months later, they put their faith in fellow evangelical Christian Mike Pompeo instead, sending a letter to the US secretary of state via a trusted Republican political appointee at the State Department. A copy of the letter was provided to BuzzFeed News by the pastor, Dale Armstrong, following an interview in Kyiv last Thursday, coincidentally just hours before Pompeo arrived in the Ukrainian capital to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky — the most senior Trump administration official to do so since the process to impeach the US president began. In the letter, Armstrong and 39 conservative Christian groups demanded that Yovanovitch be fired for supporting LGBTQ rights and undermining President Donald Trump’s “conservative policy for the USA and its foreign policy.”