Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies aged 84

Madeleine Albright, who came to the US as a refugee and made history as the first woman to be secretary of state, has died. She was 84.

Born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague in 1937 but known as Madeleine since infancy, Albright fled with her family for London in 1939 after the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. She came to the US in 1948.

She was raised Catholic and only decades later discovered her parents were Jewish and that several family members were murdered in the Holocaust.

After the election of Clinton in 1992, Albright was first ambassador to the United Nations, then secretary of state. The dominant foreign policy themes of the time were the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the years before 9/11.

Albright became secretary of state in 1997, at the time the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government. The role made her third-in-line to the presidency, though like her predecessors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski she would not have been able to fill the role, not being a natural born US citizen as defined in the constitution.

But she cast her eye worldwide.

Four years on, as Vladimir Putin amassed Russian forces on the border with Ukraine last month, Albright published a column in the New York Times in which she recalled being the first senior US figure to meet the Russian leader, in Moscow in 2000.

If Putin now ordered an invasion of Ukraine, Albright said, he would make a historic mistake. A month later, Russian troops are bogged down in brutal fighting and Russia is an international pariah.

In her interview with the Guardian, Albright said the US, which had recently chosen Trump over Hillary Clinton, had a problem with women in politics.