Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the retirement of Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat-turned-top political appointee who emerged over the last decade as one of the faces of U.S. foreign relations with Ukraine.
“It’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come,” Blinken said in a Tuesday statement. “Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting [Russian President Vladimir] 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.”
Nuland has served as the acting deputy secretary of state since the retirement of Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman last July. She relinquished that interim role following the confirmation of Deputy Secretary Kurt Campbell, who took office last month. And she has been one of the most ardent proponents of U.S. support for Ukraine in President Joe Biden’s administration, as Blinken’s team acknowledged.
“I first got to know Toria during — at the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday. “And the thing that struck me about her from day one was her clarity purpose and clarity of voice, which I know all of you probably remember well from her.”
Her departure comes at a difficult juncture of the war in Ukraine as Ukrainian forces are being battered by Russia’s large artillery arsenal while short of ammunition themselves — in part because of a dispute between Biden and congressional Republicans that has caused a protracted lapse in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.
“Nothing can damage Ukraine more than the lack of the U.S. military aid,” a Ukrainian official told the Washington Examiner while assessing the ramifications of Nuland’s departure.
Russian officials celebrated Nuland’s retirement, continuing a Kremlin tactic of ascribing to Nuland, who was the State Department’s lead official for European and Eurasian affairs from 2013 to 2017, the blame for the eruption of the conflict.
“Russophobia, which was proposed by Victoria Nuland as the main U.S. foreign policy concept, is making the Democrats sink like a stone,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tuesday. “Well, with them already being at the bottom, it’s not letting them go up.”
Russia launched the war in Ukraine in February 2014 with the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. That maneuver occurred against the backdrop of a political crisis in Kyiv, where a Ukrainian president with a pro-Russian outlook faced mass protests for scrapping a free trade agreement with the European Union at Putin’s behest.
The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove the president from office after he fled the country for Russia despite having agreed to schedule snap elections after security services killed scores of protesters — a heavy-handed measure recommended by Moscow.
“The Ukrainian government is making a mistake by resisting the use of force to solve the crisis, and if the protesters will not disperse, the violent suppression of protests will be inevitable,” then-Russian presidential adviser Sergei Glazyev said, as USA Today noted at the time.
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Nuland’s departure from the government comes just weeks after she visited Kyiv in the final days of her role as acting deputy secretary of state.
“I leave Kyiv tonight more encouraged about the unity and the result, about 2024 and its absolute strategic importance for Ukraine,” she said at the time. “I also leave more confident that as Ukraine strengthens its defenses, Mr. Putin is going to get some nice surprises on the battlefield and that Ukraine will make some very strong success.”
