Victoria Nuland, current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, is viewed as among the top three candidates being considered to replace the retiring Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman.
Nuland is aggressive in the international arena. She was the former Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian affairs during the Obama administration; and, among other high profile positions, she is a former CEO at the Center for New American Security–a hawkish military think tank funded by various military contractors, offices within the Department of Defense, and various other private and public corporations and foundations.
While serving during the Obama administration, she, along with John McCain, the now deceased war hawkish former Republican Senator from Arizona, cheered-on the Ukrainian Maidan protesters which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected, but somewhat allied with Russia, President Viktor Yanukovych. The popular coup, with some degree of western support, is the event which triggered the Russian takeover of Crimea and the subsequent Russian supported break-away movement in Ukraine’s east.
It is the moment when Russia said “enough is enough”. They had borne western expansion through NATO and the European Union right up to the Russian border in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but had warned the West repeatedly that the states of Georgia and Ukraine were red lines not to be crossed, particularly by NATO, but also to some degree by the European Union, through its economic expansion into these important Russian border states.
With Yanukovych out, and the West firming its grip on Ukraine, Russia apparently believed it could wait no longer to react. Nuland played a role in all of this–how big, I cannot say. She drew international attention when during the coup, the Russians caught her on tape in conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, when she stated, during the discussion about who should replace the deposed democratically elected Ukrainian president: “#**! the EU” (“#**!” rhymes with truck).
More recently, prior to the Nord Stream pipelines’ destruction, she, and shortly thereafter President Biden also, stated clearly that the Nord Stream II pipeline, which would deliver Russian natural gas to Germany, would not come online. Prophetic?
In my own view, we need a person who will genuinely seek a peaceful negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine. My impression is that Nuland, like so many others in Washington, will be too willing to risk nuclear war in order to gain a complete western victory in Ukraine.