The Guns of August 2023

Victoria Nuland and the Ukraine War Project

On July 28, President Joe Biden nominated U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland for Deputy Secretary of State. She replaces Wendy Sherman, who retired the same day and had served the Biden Administration in that position since April 2021. This would make Nuland the second highest ranking power in the State Department, next only to  Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

Acting Deputy Secretary of State Nuland, 62, graduated from Brown University in 1983, where she studied Russian literature, political science, and history. Her father was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and her mother was British with a Christian background. She is a Board Member of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which seems to be involved in many “Orange Revolution” regime changes. She is married to Robert Kagan, who Wikipedia describes as an American neoconservative scholar and a leading advocate of liberal interventionism. Nuland has bragged that the U.S. had spent $5 billion in Ukraine before the 2014 coup to make it into a liberal democracy. But perhaps she confuses using Ukraine as a battering ram to destroy Russia with some higher glory of interventionist democracy.  Robert Kagan is related to Kimberly Kagan, the President of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Familiar names on the ISW Board are retired General Jack Keane, who ruined my favorable impression of him by calling Civil War era Confederates, including Robert E. Lee, tritors on Fox News; arch-RINO William Kristol; and retired General David Petraeus. ISW’s biggest corporate sponsor is apparently Raytheon. ISW is now becoming famous for being completely wrong on almost everything regarding the Ukraine War and Russia.   

As an Assistant Secretary of State in 2014, Nuland played a major role in encouraging and supporting the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine that resulted in over 100 deaths and the coup that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had been elected in 2010. This was quickly followed by the election of a pro-American/pro-NATO President Petro Poroshenko in June 2014. Nuland’s incriminating telephone conversations with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt two weeks before the coup was recorded by Russian radio intelligence and are available on the internet. Her encouragement of violent regime change by extremist political parties and factions in Western Ukraine is also well documented.

Other major Obama Administration officials heavily involved in the 2014 coup were then Vice President Joe Biden and his is national security advisor Jake Sullivan, now U.S. National Security Advisor to President Biden.

Hillary Clinton left the office of Secretary of State in February 2013, but Victoria Nuland was her State Department Spokesperson for two years in 2011-2013.  Hillary Clinton has had a major influence on Nuland, and their thinking on foreign policy and national security is thought to be similar. Nuland resigned from the State Department at the beginning of the Trump Administration and was nominated by Joe Biden on January 5, 2021, for Under Secretary of State. She was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate in April 2021.

As Under Secretary of State, Nuland has been a key influence on the U.S. and NATO proxy war on the Russian Federation, which began on February 24, 2022. This was not an “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In reality, it was a long-provoked confrontation primarily by the U.S. and UK to lure Russia into a conflict with Ukraine that would weaken Russia militarily, economically, and financially and to force regime change in Russia, targeting in particular Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

The war in Ukraine is not going well for Ukraine or its NATO allies. According to military author and consultant Douglas Macgregor, over 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. More than 12 million refugees have fled the country and most do not intend to return. Without the Donbass states and Crimea, the flood of fleeing refugees has reduced the population to less than 25 million. The Ukrainian economy is in shambles and almost totally dependent on the United States. Both NATO and American conventional war munitions are severely depleted. European Union economies are suffering major energy shortages, and support for the Ukraine War has become a political liability. The U.S. is losing diplomatic credibility across the globe. Cracks in the viability of the EU and NATO are becoming visible. Financial sanctions on Russian trade have backfired and helped Russia, while placing immense burdens on many European Union nations. Russian military casualties have been dramatically lower than Ukrainian casualties, which many are describing as catastrophic. Various estimates indicate a KIA ratio of 6 to 10 Ukrainians killed for every Russian.

Yanukovych had been Prime Minister of Ukraine, Governor of Donetsk, and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament. Donetsk is predominantly Russian in culture, language, and ethnicity. More than a third of Ukraine’s population is culturally Russian, and nine Ukrainian states in southern and eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, are 60 to 90 percent Russian in language, culture, and political identity. Yanukovych had tried to govern balancing the Ukrainian cultural and economic interests in western and central Ukraine with Russian cultural and economic interests in eastern and southern Ukraine. But American and NATO interests were for Ukraine to be a bulwark against Russian influence. From 2014 to 2022 the U.S. and NATO built the Ukrainian Army into the largest and best equipped and trained army in NATO except for the U.S. and Turkey. This was despite Ukraine not being a legal member of NATO. The Russians had warned since 2008 that Ukraine becoming a member of NATO was a major Redline, but they were ignored.

The Poroshenko regime, elected in June 2014, proceeded to persecute and subject the Russian minority to cultural cleansing programs and an anti-terrorist campaign against dissenters in Donetsk, Lugansk, and Odessa. The three most predominantly Russian states of Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea immediately attempted secession from Ukraine, requesting accession to Russia. By April 2014, a civil war broke out that had killed over 14,000 people by February 2022. . The Russian Duma immediately accepted Crimea’s 2014 public referendum and request. The Russian accession of Crimea, which was only about 15 percent Ukrainian, was bloodless. The Russians encouraged the two Donbass Republics to stay with Ukraine as autonomous republics within Ukraine in order to maintain some political influence on Ukrainian government.  

Ukrainian persecution, cultural cleansing, and interference with the Moscow connected Ukrainian Orthodox Church, however, continued. There was a largely unsuccessful cease-fire in September 2014 (Minsk 1). The Minsk 2 Accords of February 2015 would have resolved the conflict, but although they had agreed to them and signed them, Ukraine, with the apparent backing of Germany and France, never implemented them. Germany, France, the United States, and the UK only regarded them as a delaying tactic to build up the Ukrainian Army to take back Crimea and weaken Russia. It was the final Minsk 2 betrayal, increased persecution of Russian ethnics in Ukraine, escalated Ukrainian Army artillery strikes on Donetsk civilians, and growing  concern and sympathy in Russia about the suffering of Russian ethnics in Ukraine that finally provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch a military expedition to show that Minsk 2 must be implemented and Ukraine cannot be a member of NATO without being an existential threat to Russian national security. Ukraine and Russia came close to a negotiated resolution in Istanbul in April 2022, but this was rejected by Ukrainian President Zelensky following heavy pressure and persuasion by the U.S. and UK, thinking the Russians could easily be beaten.   

In the spring of 2011, Nuland helped Hillary Clinton destroy Libya by ramping up a plan to remove Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi. Like many regime changes, this resulted in Ghaddafi’s brutal murder and the collapse of all law and authority. The country was left in military, governmental, and economic chaos. Clinton later commented: “We came, we saw, he died.” Many Libyans have found illegal refuge in Southern Europe.

In early 2012, Nuland was ramping up another regime change for Bashar Assad in Syria. Thus the U.S. became an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Arab Spring expansion. Assad, a former London ophthalmologist, was actually a moderate Alawite Muslim, who protected Syrian Christians.  There were more than 1.7 million Christians in Syria at the time, about 10 percent of the population. ACN, a Catholic charity group estimates there are now less than 300,000 Christians in Syria, less than 2 percent of the Syrian population. Most of the rest fled to Europe, but Al-Qaeda may have slaughtered thousands. In the Syrian War fiasco, America’s allies were actually Al-Qaeda terrorists disguised under deceptive names like “The Free Syrian Army.” During the war, Hillary Clinton was shipping arms from Libya to Al-Qaeda. One of their methods was using false-flag real or faked chemical attacks. President Trump seemed to have bought into one of these, although his response indicated he was beginning to have strong doubts about our “Free Syrian” allies. Trump eventually caught on and insisted on getting U.S. troops out of Syria, but some still remain.

As a Russian expert, Nuland was undoubtedly involved in the U.S. assistance to Boris Yeltsin’s two presidential terms from 1991 to the end of 1999, including his 1996 reelection campaign.  The American “shock therapy” for the Russian economy, however, caused a 50 percent drop in GDP from 1991 to 1999, when social safety nets were disappearing, causing widespread public despair. Putin took over the presidency in 2000, and the economy grew 79 percent in seven years. This is one of the reasons Putin remains astonishingly popular among Russian voters. His June 2023 approval rating was 81 percent because of his handling of the economy under duress and approval of his resistance to American and NATO threats to Russian National Security. They recognize NATO is distorting the issues on Ukraine and using Ukraine as battering ram to cripple the Russian economy, military capabilities, and status as a world power.   

According to February 18, 2021, article in Covert Geopolitics, Nuland also boosted the “Steele Dossier,” which alleged collaboration between Russia and Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election. This is now recognized as an outrageous political lie.  

Vitoria Nuland and Joe Biden also threatened to destroy the Nordstream Pipelines to keep Germany from trading with Russia and abandoning NATO’s  Ukraine War objectives. She seemed delighted when the pipelines were sabotaged by high-explosives.

Promoting Victoria Nuland sends a discouraging signal to those who want peace. It is more than discouraging. It is a frightening disregard for truth, ethical foreign policy, and the dangers and destruction of catastrophic nuclear war.