(Headline USA) Victoria Nuland, the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat and frequent target of criticism for her hawkish views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will leave her post this month, the State Department said Tuesday.
Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served as assistant secretary of State for Europe during the Obama administration but retired after Donald Trump was elected president, returned to government as undersecretary of State for political affairs in the Biden administration.
In both the Obama and Biden administrations, she played a significant role in America’s nationbuilding efforts in Ukraine, beginning with the 2014 color revolution that ousted its Russia-friendly leader and installed one more friendly and pliant to the Obama government.
Joe Biden himself was caught in a candid 2016 correspondence with then-Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko discussing efforts to conceal America’s operations in Ukraine from the incoming Trump administration.
“This is getting very, very close to what I don’t want to have happen,” Biden said in a recorded message. “I don’t want Trump to get in the position where he thinks he’s about to buy on to a policy where the financial system is going to collapse and he’s going to be looked to to pour more money into Ukraine.”
Here’s corrupt, compromised, criminal biden ON TAPE trying to cover up his corruption in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/O9EvObaAAR
— The Researcher (@listen_2learn) June 17, 2023
He later told Poroshenko, “No, no, they are not [working with Trump],” after the latter expressed concerns about the possibility that the FBI might get involved.
Meanwhile, seditious partisans embedded in the National Security Council, who were working in tandem with Democrats, set up Trump for an impeachment scandal after he called on newly elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to reopen an investigation.
Biden’s own government has since pourd hundreds of millions of dollars into the country under the administration, while the New York Times recently acknowledged at least 12 secret CIA bases were operating in the country.
Nuland herself admitted in congressional testimony shortly after Russia’s February 2022 invasion that the U.S. maintained laboratories in Ukraine that were likely conducting reserach into biological warfare.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which we are now quite concerned Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of,” she said in response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
While the specific reasons for Nuland’s latest retirement were not immediately known, it may be an indication that America’s meddling in Ukraine is about to come to light in a more serious way, where those left holding the bag will face accountability.
Greater concern over Biden’s declining faculties and general electability suggest that Democrats may seek to oust the president—perhaps through leaks about the true nature of the Ukraine operations.
Meanwhile, waning public support—particularly among fiscal conservatives—has left the prospect of future funding for Ukraine uncertain, which may compel Zelenskyy to speak out as he faces the prospect of losing his own grip on power.
Either way, there are clear signs that Ukraine—once the cause célèbre of leftists, globalists and neocons everywhere—may be taking a back seat to China where, despite Biden’s close business relationships with the trans-Pacific superpower, there are growing concerns about President Xi Jinping’s efforts to undermine U.S. geopolitical interests, including Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Nuland had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell—somtimes considered to be Biden’s “Asia czar”—to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.
Nuland had served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
She then became U.S. ambassador to NATO before being tapped to serve as the State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during President Barack Obama’s first term.
As the department spokeswoman and later as assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Nuland drew the ire of many Russian leaders for her outspoken defense of Ukraine, particularly after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry has recalled on numerous times that when Nuland left the spokeswoman’s job during his tenure to become the top diplomat for Europe, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov congratulated him for “getting rid of that woman.”
Kerry said he replied to Lavrov that he didn’t get rid of her, “I promoted her.”
Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Nuland for her three and a half decades of public service and thanked her for her role in shaping U.S. policy around the world under six presidents and 10 secretaries of state.
“But it’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come,” Blinken said in a statement.
“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 added.
Nuland will be replaced temporarily as undersecretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from the country. He is currently the undersecretary of state for management.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
