Russia hawk Victoria Nuland is stepping down from her role as under secretary of state for political affairs, the number three position at the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Tuesday.
Her retirement comes just two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and after she lost out for the deputy secretary of state position to another diplomat, Kurt Campbell. She had served in the position on an acting basis for seven months.
Blinken said in a statement:
Victoria Nuland has let me know that she intends to step down in the coming weeks as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs — a role in which she has personified President Biden’s commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy and revitalize America’s global leadership at a crucial time for our nation and the world.
He specifically noted her work on Ukraine.
Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marshaling a global coalition to ensure his strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will be able to stand strongly on its own feet — democratically, economically, and militarily.
Blinken said he and President Joe Biden has asked John Bass — who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan during Biden’s botched and deadly withdrawal — to fill Nuland’s role until her replacement is confirmed.
According to the New York Times, some analysts interpreted Campbell’s promotion over Nuland a sign that Biden and Blinken considered the U.S. relationship with China as a higher priority than Ukraine.
Nuland was reviled by the Russian government for her support of Ukraine becoming more pro-West and anti-Russia. Her hawkish views towards Russia also drew criticism of those skeptical of U.S. foreign interventionism.
Daniel Larison, a columnist for Responsible Statecraft, contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a former senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, wrote in a piece:
Nuland was a combative liberal hawk during her time in government, and she was consistently one of the most aggressive proponents of U.S. backing for Ukraine and NATO expansion. Her career sometimes exemplified the heedless and arrogant foreign policy worldview that she championed.
She was the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Dick Cheney during the first two years of the Iraq war, and then served as U.S. NATO ambassador in Brussels during Bush’s second term. Nuland was an early cheerleader for Ukrainian membership in the alliance. She reportedly advised the Ukrainian government at the time to launch an information campaign to “dispel the image of NATO as a ‘four-letter word.’”
As the U.S. representative at NATO at the 2008 Bucharest summit, she pressed allies to grant Membership Action Plans (MAPs) to Ukraine and Georgia. When the German and French governments balked at that idea, she was involved in the blunder in which the alliance promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted to NATO. The promise at Bucharest contributed to the August war later that year between Russia and Georgia, and it laid the foundation for the later tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
In her role as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe under Obama, Nuland was involved in meddling in Ukrainian affairs during the Maidan protests. She was captured in news photographs during those demonstrations in Kyiv handing sandwiches to the protesters who later helped oust the elected Yanukovych government.
In February 2023, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk posted on X about the Ukraine War: “Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland.”
Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2023
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Tuesday attributed Nuland’s retirement to the “failure” of the Biden administration’s policy on Russia.
“They won’t tell you the reason,” Zakharova said, according to the Associated Press. “But it is simple — the failure of the anti-Russian course of the Biden administration. Russophobia, proposed by Victoria Nuland as the main foreign policy concept of the United States, is dragging the Democrats to the bottom like a stone.”
In addition, Tass, the Russian state news agency, highlighted an article by a pro-Russia news outlet that said Nuland’s retirement was indicative that Washington’s policy on Ukraine had led to an “impasse.” The article said Nuland had played a “key role” in building the “post-Maidan” power in Ukraine, referring to the aftermath of protests that led to the resignation of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych. It also faulted her for not implementing the Minsk Agreements.
The article also said Nuland, in her current role, was unable to prevent the beginning of the “Russian special military operation” in Ukraine and then, “despite the numerous loud statements, was effectively unable to ensure a proper level of support for Ukraine, which led to the failure of the last year’s counteroffensive and the current difficult [for Ukraine] situation on the battlefield.”
“All this, combined with the sharp escalation of internal political struggle within the US itself, gave the West a sense of a dead end in [Washington’s] Ukrainian strategy, Nuland being one of its key designers. And, in this regard, her retirement appears quite natural. The process needs a new designer, or, rather, a new design,” the article said.
Nuland served a career foreign service officer who was appointed as assistant secretary of state for Europe during the Obama administration. She retired after Donald Trump was elected president and returned to serve under Biden.
She had also served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the 1990s and was there during an attempted coup against then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. She later served as U.S. ambassador to NATO and then as State Department spokeswoman during then-President Barack Obama’s first term.
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