Victoria Nuland, veteran Russia Hawk, is leaving the State Department
Victoria J. Nuland, the No. 3 official at the State Department and a steadfast advocate of a tough policy toward Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, is retiring this month after more than three decades of government service.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced Ms. Nuland’s departure as assistant secretary of state for political affairs on Tuesday in a statement that noted her “fierce passion” for freedom, democracy and human rights, and America’s promotion of these causes in the abroad.
Mr. Blinken highlighted her work on Ukraine, which he called “indispensable to confronting Putin’s large-scale invasion of the country.”
Ms. Nuland has held numerous positions at the Department of State, including spokeswoman, and was once deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. But she has made her mark as a Russia specialist who has long advocated a strong resistance to Putin’s territorial ambitions and foreign political influence.
As Russia’s top State Department official during the Obama administration, she unsuccessfully advocated arming Ukraine with anti-tank missiles, and during the Biden administration she was one of the leading advocates of sending Ukraine more and better American weapons.
A skilled bureaucratic operator, she presented her arguments with sharp humor and a bluntness that aroused a mixture of admiration and fear among colleagues. “She always says what she thinks,” Mr. Blinken noted gently.
She rose to prominence in 2014 after referring to the European Union with an expletive in a phone conversation about Ukrainian politics that was recorded and leaked in what U.S. officials believe was the work of Russia.
During the Biden administration, Ms. Nuland became a lightning rod for skeptics of U.S. support for Ukraine. “No one is encouraging this war more than Nuland,” said Tesla co-founder Elon Musk wrote on the social media site X last February.
She was vilified in Moscow as an avatar of a Washington establishment seen as plotting to undermine Russia and even overthrow Mr Putin. Russian officials and media outlets continually recall how Ms. Nuland, then the U.S. Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, handed out food to protesters in Kiev’s central square in early 2014, ultimately toppling Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed leader brought.
“In 2014, a coup took place in Ukraine after Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handed out cookies to terrorists,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said last year. (Ms. Nuland said she handed out sandwiches, not cookies.)
Ms. Nuland’s departure was treated as big news by the Kremlin-backed English-language news site RT, which had a red banner on its home page and the headline “NULAND QUITS.”
RT quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as attributing Ms. Nuland’s departure to “the failure of the Biden administration’s anti-Russian line.” She claimed that “Russophobia, presented by Victoria Nuland as the most important concept of United States foreign policy, is dragging the Democrats down like a stone.”
Ms. Nuland spent much of last year as acting deputy secretary of state following the retirement of Wendy Sherman, who had held the position for the first two and a half years of the Biden administration.
She was considered a natural candidate to replace Ms. Sherman on a full-time basis. But Mr. Blinken tapped Kurt Campbell, previously the National Security Council’s top official for Asia, for the post. Mr. Campbell was confirmed by the Senate on February 6.
Mr. Blinken said the department’s undersecretary for management, John Bass, would take over Ms. Nuland’s duties on an acting basis until a replacement was confirmed.
Some analysts interpreted Campbell’s choice as a sign that President Biden and Blinken see managing the U.S. relationship with China as their top priority, despite the way Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has consumed much of Biden’s foreign policy.
Ms Nuland spoke publicly last month about the future of Ukraine, the country in which she had invested many hundreds of hours of her life.
“If Putin wins in Ukraine, he will not stop there, and autocrats around the world will feel emboldened to change the status quo by force,” she warned in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mr. Putin “thinks he can wait us all out,” she said. “We have to prove him wrong.”