Victoria Nuland, third-highest ranking US diplomat and critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine, retiring
WASHINGTON — Victoria Nuland, the third-highest-ranking U.S. diplomat and a 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 political affairs in the Biden administration.
She 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 battle for administration staff when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell as No. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.
Nuland had served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during 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 asked to serve as State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during President Barack Obama’s first term.
As a department spokeswoman and later as deputy secretary of state for Europe, Nuland drew the ire of many Russian leaders for her outspoken defense of Ukraine, especially after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry has repeatedly recalled that when Nuland left the spokeswoman’s job during his term to become the top diplomat for Europe, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov congratulated him for “getting rid of that woman.” . Kerry said he replied to Lavrov that he wasn’t losing 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 is 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 in confronting Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, assembling a global coalition to guarantee his strategic failure, and helping Ukraine move toward the day when it will be able to stand strong on its own two feet. – democratic, economic, and military.”
Nuland will be temporarily replaced as secretary of state by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country. He is currently State Secretary for Management.