The Damage Victoria Nuland Has Done

The Fifth Amendment, it seems, is something Victoria Nuland is unaware of. The former undersecretary of state for political affairs just keeps incriminating herself. But her statements—both intercepted and public—have done more than incriminate herself: They have incriminated the United States. Nuland’s statements have acted as some of the most important sources for U.S. involvement in Ukraine from the roots of the war, the growth of the war, and the decision not to cut down the war and stop it.

The war in Ukraine is a tangled web woven from three separate, but related, conflicts: the conflict within Ukraine, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the conflict between NATO and Ukraine. Nuland has had a hand in all of them.

The conflict within Ukraine goes back long before the war with Russia, but the proximate cause is the 2014 coup that removed Viktor Yanukovych from power and replaced him with the Western-leaning Petro Poroshenko. Nuland was a force in that coup, and her comments are among the most important sources of proof of U.S. involvement.

The “Maidan Revolution” received American financial backing. The U.S.-government funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded a staggering 65 pro-Maidan projects inside Ukraine. Nuland revealed that there was much more U.S. money flowing into Ukraine than the money provided by the NED. In December 2013, she told an audience at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference that the U.S. had “invested over $5 billion” to secure a “democratic Ukraine.”

But Nuland did more than disclose U.S.-financed meddling in Ukraine. Nuland, who ran the Obama State Department’s Ukraine policy, revealed the deep involvement of the U.S. in the coup itself. Nuland was caught plotting who the Americans wanted to be the winner of the regime change. She can be heard on an intercepted call telling the American ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, that Arseniy Yatsenyuk is America’s choice to replace Yanukovych. Most importantly, Pyatt refers to the West needing to “midwife this thing,” an admission of America’s role in the coup. At one point, Nuland even seems to say that then Vice President Joe Biden himself would be willing to do the midwifery.

Along with Senator John McCain, Nuland, who at this time was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, publicly endorsed and supported the anti-Yanukovych protesters. Nuland also applied pressure on security forces to stop guarding government buildings in Kiev and so to allow the protesters in.

Once the coup was completed and the war was on, Nuland was one of the leading voices for escalation and a lack of caution over Russian redlines. On February 17, Nuland publicly called for the demilitarization of Crimea and said that Washington supports Ukrainian attacks on military targets in Crimea despite the U.S. belief that such actions would cross a Russian redline and dangerously escalate the war.

Nuland’s comments have also been a source of incrimination of U.S. involvement in clandestine operations during the war, including in one of the most spectacular political and environmental acts of terrorism in history. On January 27, 2022, Nuland declared, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. On September 26, the Nord Stream pipeline exploded.

Nuland’s comments have not only been invaluable sources on U.S. involvement in the events leading up to the war and in U.S. involvement in its escalation, but she has now also implied that the U.S. was actively involved in killing talks that might have ended the war. 

There is a large and growing body of evidence that peace talks that might have succeeded in the early days of the war were blocked by the West. Testimonials come from several individuals who played a role or were present, including Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, Germany’s former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish officials, and Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team, as well as from reporting on the intervention of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The New York Times has recently reported that “American officials were alarmed at the terms” and patronizingly asked the Ukrainians, who had agreed to those terms, whether they “understand this is unilateral disarmament.”

In confirming the reporting by the Times, Victoria Nuland may now have become the first American official to imply that the West played a role in blocking the peace talks. In a September 5 interview, Nuland said, 

Relatively late in the game the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going and it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others that Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on. It was about restrictions on the exact number of weapons systems that would be available to Ukraine after the deal. It would basically be neutered as a military force. At the same time, there were no such restrictions for Russia. It was not required to retreat, or to create a buffer zone on the Ukrainian border, or to impose similar restrictions on its own forces opposing Ukraine. So, people inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart.

Nuland also supported the idea that the talks were genuine, saying, “Russia had an interest at that time in at least seeing what it could get. Ukraine, obviously, had an interest if they could stop the war and get and get Russia out.”

Nuland suggests that there was a possible deal, that the two sides appear to have been genuinely engaged in negotiations and that things fell apart when, rather than encouraging further negotiations, the West began to question the deal.

Even now, two and a half years later, when the Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance outlines what a peace plan for the war in Ukraine could look like, it is the now retired Victoria Nuland who reemerges to shoot it down.

From the causes of the war, to escalating U.S. involvement in the war, to the West’s role in continuing the war when peace talks seemed possible, Victoria Nuland has been both the source of a great deal of damage and the source of a great deal of information on the United States’ role in contributing to the war and to road blocks to ending it.