Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland will resign in the coming weeks, the U.S. Department of State made a statement on this.
Nuland served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under the Barack Obama administration. She resigned the post in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected president in 2017. Then she was appointed to the post of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
She was expected to replace Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State, and even served as acting deputy secretary of state for seven months, following Sherman’s retirement. However, U.S. President Joe Biden appointed someone else to the post.
Incumbent U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken greatly appreciated Nuland’s more than three decades of public service and thanked her for the role she has played in shaping U.S. policy around the world under six presidents and 10 secretaries of state.
In Russia, Nuland is remembered with “State Department donuts”. In 2013, during the Maidan in Kyiv, she visited the protesters in the tent city with the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, where they distributed sandwiches and donuts to the protesters. Since then, the phrase “State Department donuts” has often been used by the Russian media when referring to the U.S. support for protests.
