The EU Ambassador who grew up translating for her refugee grandmother

A child of refugees who grew up translating at the dinner table

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Dr. Riina Kionka — EU Ambassador to Pakistan — and immediately asking about her earliest years. What follows is a portrait that is, in its own way, a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe.

Kionka was born in the United States, but she is quick to clarify what that means. “I am a child of refugees,” she says. Her mother’s family fled Estonia when the Soviet Union moved in after the Second World War, joining hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who flowed westward across the continent. The US did not open its doors immediately. Her mother spent six years in a refugee camp before immigration countries began accepting displaced Eastern Europeans in the late 1940s.

The family that eventually settled in Michigan was three generations under one roof — very typical of Pakistan, Kionka notes with a smile — and the household ran on constant translation. Kionka and her sister would translate from Estonian into English for their father, and from English into Estonian for their grandmother. “It was a kind of multiple identity childhood from the very start,” she says. That childhood, coloured by her mother’s nightmares about fleeing her homeland, pointed her directly toward international relations rather than the family profession of medicine. Her sister became a neurologist. Kionka became a diplomat.

From Michigan to Columbia, with a gap year selling coffee beans

Muzamil asks about the path from that childhood to a career in foreign policy. Kionka traces it through a bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University — in a small college focused on policy studies — followed by a gap year she had not planned for. She graduated in 1983 into a mini-recession and could not find work in international relations. “I remember having sent out tens and tens of application letters,” she recalls. The rejection letters came back one by one.

She worked four jobs in the same city: selling coffee beans before Starbucks existed, acting as a personal assistant to a quadriplegic student, translating legal documents from German into English, and working in a pizza shop. Friends suggested she open her own place and call it Pizzarina. She lasted about six weeks before applying to graduate programmes. She eventually completed a PhD in political science and international relations at Columbia University — though thirteen years passed between starting and finishing, because the world outside became too interesting to ignore.

Her research focus shifted with history. She began studying Soviet foreign policy and Soviet nationality policy — what the non-Russian peoples inside the Soviet Union were doing — because she was Estonian and it mattered to her personally. By the time she finished, the Soviet Union had collapsed and her dissertation had to find a different frame entirely.

Radio Free Europe, Estonia’s independence, and being present at the creation

Kionka’s first job out of university was as a research analyst at Radio Free Europe in Munich, writing short analytical pieces for the Estonian-language service and for what was called cross-reporting — ensuring that listeners in one country knew what was happening in neighbouring countries. The premise of the station was simple: there was no free press in the Eastern Bloc, so this was surrogate broadcasting.

She worked there from 1989 to 1993, a period that overlapped with one of the most dramatic reversals in modern European history. Estonia reinstated its independence. The Soviet Union fell apart. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. Kionka describes sitting in Munich writing analysis while Estonia was holding its first free elections, carrying out monetary reform, leaving the ruble zone, and writing a new constitution. At a certain point, she says, it became “suddenly really boring to sit in Munich far away and write analysis.” She quit her job and joined Estonia’s new foreign ministry.

Muzamil asks what that moment of independence felt like for Estonians around the world. Kionka pauses. Her mother, she says, is still alive. “It was a dream come true, really. It was what they had been working for.” She describes the Estonian diaspora as politically active in the same way many overseas Pakistanis are — always thinking about home, always working toward something. Nobody from her family had visited Soviet-occupied Estonia. After independence, they started going back. Kionka had already been making trips for her Radio Free Europe research, watching the transition happen in real time.

She spent roughly twelve years as an Estonian diplomat — including a posting as Estonian Ambassador to Germany — before joining the European Union in 2005, a year after Estonia’s accession. Within the EU, she spent seven years on human rights policy as the high representative’s adviser, worked on Central Asia, and then spent five years as diplomatic adviser to European Council President Donald Tusk.

How the EU was built: coal, steel, and baby steps

Muzamil asks Kionka to explain how a continent that tore itself apart twice in one century became the collaborative union it is today. Her answer is precise.

It started in 1950 with the Schumann Declaration — named for French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann — which proposed pooling the production of coal and steel in what became the European Coal and Steel Community. The logic was elegant: if France and Germany needed each other to produce the raw materials of war, war between them became not just unthinkable but materially impossible. “That was how the whole thing got started,” Kionka says.

What followed was a methodology of incremental steps — “itty bitty teeny tiny baby steps on very practical, very sort of boring matters” — through which a culture of trust was built over decades. Each new treaty added policy areas. Trade. The single market. Justice and home affairs. Member states gradually handed over decision-making in certain domains to the European Commission while retaining vetoes in others, particularly foreign policy. The European Parliament, directly elected and proportional to population, now acts as co-legislator on 95% of EU legislation.

Kionka walks Muzamil through the three main institutions: the Commission, which proposes legislation; the Council, where member state ministers sit in various formations and decide; and the Parliament, which co-legislates. Most Europeans, she admits, do not understand how it works either. The EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 in recognition of what she calls “the most successful peace project in the world.”

Brexit, right-wing politics, and the strains on the European project

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises Brexit. Kionka is candid: “If I could tell you exactly, then I’d be a millionaire.” What she can say is that it was primarily a political problem — years of internal Conservative Party pressure culminating in a referendum that David Cameron called and lost. What followed was several years of withdrawal talks that nobody had been designed to conduct. “We were set up for enlargement,” she says. Running the process in reverse, across every integrated policy area simultaneously, had to be invented as it went along.

On the rise of right-wing politics across Europe, Kionka does not dismiss it. She describes it as a gut reaction against the negative sides of globalisation — a turn inward, toward the national and the protectionist. She traces the splintering of the European Parliament’s traditional three-bloc structure back to around 2010, well before the Syrian refugee crisis. The migration wave of 2015 catalysed certain national leaderships, but it did not create the underlying conditions. The deeper problem, she says, is that when member states no longer sing from the same song sheet on fundamental rights, achieving consensus becomes much harder for an organisation built on consensus.

Russia’s war on Ukraine: a wake-up call, not a provocation

Muzamil raises the Russia-Ukraine conflict carefully, including the argument — made by Russia and repeated in some quarters — that NATO expansion to Russia’s borders provoked the invasion. Kionka is direct: “It’s nonsense.”

Her reasoning is structural. NATO does not expand. Countries ask to join it, for their own reasons. Estonia asked to join because it did not want to be caught in a security vacuum between Russia and the West. “It wasn’t NATO imposing itself saying, now you’re going to join us because we’re expanding and we want to get closer to Russia. No.” The idea that any organisation has a right to a sphere of influence is, she says, “all very nineteenth century.”

On the war itself, she is equally clear. “Russia’s aggression on Ukraine — and let’s be clear here — this was an invasion that was unjustified. It was illegal by international law. It was unprovoked.” The soldiers who went in, she notes, packed their dress uniforms for a victory parade they expected within days. That did not happen. What happened instead was a total mobilisation of Ukrainian society, millions of refugees — mostly women and children — crossing into Europe, and a series of steps within the EU that Kionka describes as revolutionary: Denmark rejoining the EU’s defence arm after a referendum, Finland and Sweden applying to NATO, and EU budgets being used for military assistance to Ukraine for the first time.

On the economic consequences, she is measured. Inflation is out of control. Fuel prices are elevated. Official buildings in Brussels are not permitted to heat above 19 degrees. “It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.” But she takes heart in polling that shows strong European public support for Ukraine, and in the fact that people are opening their homes to refugees and donating money and clothing.

Muzamil raises the comparison between how Europe has received Ukrainian refugees and how it received Syrian refugees in 2015. Kionka does not deflect. She acknowledges the difference, but pushes back on the framing of whataboutism — the idea that every conflict is directly comparable. Each conflict, she argues, should be assessed on its own merits against the standard of international law. She also notes a learning curve: the instruments and procedures developed during the Syrian crisis have been directly useful in managing the Ukrainian refugee situation. “That’s exactly what happened between the Syrian migration and the migrants that are coming because of the Russia war on Ukraine.”

Climate finance, the floods, and what the EU is actually doing in Pakistan

Muzamil shifts to climate change, and Kionka’s tone becomes more personal. She visited Sindh while flood waters were still high, accompanying the EU’s emergency response commissioner. “It was horrible, what has happened here. Pakistan emits very little and was really hit hard.” She describes the 2022 floods as not just one of the worst in Pakistan’s history but one of the worst in the world’s history.

The EU’s stated goal is carbon neutrality by 2050, with an interim target of 55% below 1990 emission levels by 2030 — the policy known as Fit for 55. The vehicle for getting there is the European Green Deal, which Kionka describes not as a climate policy but as an economic growth strategy: “It’s actually an economic growth policy.”

Muzamil raises the tension that developing countries face — the global North used cheap carbon energy to develop, and now wants to set rules that make that path unavailable to the South. He gives the example of a coal plant commissioned under CPEC producing electricity at 4.5 rupees per unit against an average of 45 to 50 rupees from other sources. Kionka acknowledges the argument directly. “Did we make mistakes in the past? Absolutely. Do we realize that? Oh, yes.” She notes that the EU produces about 9% of global emissions but provides roughly 30% of public global climate financing. She also flags the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), coming into effect in October 2023, which she describes as an attempt to ensure the EU is not effectively exporting pollution — though she notes it begins with five industrial product categories, none of which Pakistan currently exports to the EU.

On what the EU is concretely doing in Pakistan, she outlines a development programme focused on Gilgit-Baltistan, KP, and Balochistan, with an emphasis on sustainable energy and resilience. The broader EU-Pakistan relationship rests on three pillars: development cooperation, trade, and political engagement. The GSP Plus trade programme, she says, has grown Pakistani exports to the EU by two thirds since 2013.

Transparency, visas, and the match between Pakistan’s youth and Europe’s ageing population

Muzamil asks directly about corruption and whether EU development money actually reaches the people it is meant to reach. Kionka draws a clear distinction between humanitarian funding — which never goes directly to governments, always through implementing partners like UN agencies or NGOs — and development funding, which comes with extensive monitoring, auditing, and financial management requirements. “You can talk to any NGO in this country, and they will tell you how complicated it is to get money from the EU.” The reason, she says, is accountability to EU taxpayers.

On visas, Kionka is careful to note that visa policy is a member state competence — the EU delegation in Islamabad does not issue visas. But she does not dismiss Muzamil’s account of the experience: long queues in summer heat, no food or water, conditions he describes as unworthy of an institution that prides itself on human rights. She agrees that many Europeans have no idea how difficult mobility is for others, because they have grown up in a borderless Schengen zone and travel on strong passports. The reason so many Pakistanis are denied visas, she explains, comes down to overstay rates — member states calibrate their visa issuance based on the percentage of previous visitors who did not return. “When many people abuse the system, the others suffer, unfortunately.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Kionka arrive at what she calls a potential match made in heaven. Europe has an ageing population that needs workers and caregivers. Pakistan has a young, IT-savvy population that needs employment. A new EU-Pakistan dialogue on legal migration and mobility — launched when Commissioner Johansson visited in November 2022 — is in its earliest stages. “It’s in its real baby steps,” Kionka says. The goal is not for governments to produce workers for specific factories, but to facilitate the conditions under which the match can happen.

Asked whether the golden age of Europe is over, she pauses. “Maybe it’s not even begun yet.” She describes the current moment as a turning point that historians will one day mark as the beginning of a shift — driven by the green transition, the end of carbon-based growth, and the reckoning with the limits of globalisation. Her vision for 2050 is spare and specific: most people will have given up eating meat, will travel by bicycle or equivalent, will run on renewable energy, and will buy almost nothing new. Whether the world reaches those targets or not, she says, is less important than the direction of travel. “If you reach for the stars, you may not make it, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud either.”