Foreign Affairs
The Damage Victoria Nuland Has Done
The State Department’s former top woman on Ukraine has been an invaluable source on Americans’ involvement in the war—particularly her own.
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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 …