The architect of US foreign policy in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, has announced her retirement from the State Department

Victoria Nuland, considered the Biden administration’s top Russia hawk and powerful advocate for military support for Ukraine has announced her retirement.

Victoria Nuland, the Biden administration’s top Russia hawk, will retire.

One of the most powerful figures in US foreign policy, Victoria Nuland, the Biden administration’s top Russia hawk and most forceful proponent of US military support for Ukraine has announced her retirement at 62.

Secretary of State Antony Blinked on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) said the Undersecretary of State for Political affairs, Washington’s number three diplomat, would leave her post “in coming weeks”, prompting critics to claim her departure was an admission of failure as the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third year.

Mr Blinken lavished praise on the career diplomat’s “encyclopaedia knowledge … and an unmatched capacity to wield the full toolkit of American diplomacy to advance our interests and values”.

Ms Nuland, who is married to the neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan, rose to global prominence in 2014 after she said “f*ck the EU” on a leaked phone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, revealing her frustration with European governments’ reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia.

“She always speaks her mind – to my benefit and to the benefit of our foreign policy,” Mr Blinken said in a statement released on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT).

“Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marshalling 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”.

Ms Nuland, who was in Kyiv to confer with top Ukrainian officials as recently as January, was a powerful advocate for bringing Ukraine into NATO and peeling the former soviet state away from Russia’s orbit, allegedly helping the February 2014 ‘maidan’ revolution that ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych.

In the infamous leaked phone call in February 2014 Ms Nuland told the US ambassador in Kyiv that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who served twice as Ukrainian prime minister until 2016, should lead the new pro-US government.

In a speech in 2013 she said the US had spent $5 billion to encourage Ukraine “to achieve its European aspirations”. Last month the New York Times revealed the CIA had built at least 12 bases in Ukraine since 2014 to spy on Russia.

In the weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 Ms Nuland raised eyebrows in testimony before congress, revealing that Ukraine had “biological research facilities” in answer to a question by Republican senator Marco Rubio, who had sought to dispel unproven Russian and Chinese claims that Ukraine had a biological weapons program.

“We are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops may be seeking to gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces,” Ms Nuland then said.

The veteran diplomat became a hate figure among the US isolationist right. “Preserve your documents. Lawyer up baby because we are coming for you,” Donald Trump confidant Steve Bannon said on social media soon after the announcement. “You are the fountain head of everything about this Ukraine situation”.

Russia’s foreign ministry seized on the resignation as supposed evidence of the “failure of the anti-Russian course of the Biden administration” in a statement by Maria Zakharova.

“Russophobia, proposed by Victoria Nuland as the main foreign policy concept of the United States, is dragging the Democrats to the bottom like a stone.”

Ms Nuland will be replaced temporarily by John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021.