If anything we need more like her.J wrote: ↑2024-03-10 12:43pm https://apnews.com/article/state-depart ... e7520e3086
The deranged psychopath who said, and I quote, "fuck the EU!" and played a huge part in getting us into this mess in the Ukraine is now gone. Good riddance to a piece of trash.Victoria Nuland, third-highest ranking US diplomat and critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine, retiring
WASHINGTON (AP) — Victoria Nuland, the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat and frequent target of criticism for her hawkish views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will retire and leave her post this month, the State Department said Tuesday.
Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe during the Obama administration but retired after Donald Trump was elected president, returned to government as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration.
She had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.
Nuland had served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
She then became U.S. ambassador to NATO before being tapped to serve as the State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during President Barack Obama’s first term.
As the department spokeswoman and later as assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Nuland drew the ire of many Russian leaders for her outspoken defense of Ukraine, particularly after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry has recalled on numerous times that when Nuland left the spokeswoman’s job during his tenure to become the top diplomat for Europe, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov congratulated him for “getting rid of that woman.” Kerry said he replied to Lavrov that he didn’t get rid of her, “I promoted her.”
Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Nuland for her three and a half decades of public service and thanked her for her role in shaping U.S. policy around the world under six presidents and 10 secretaries of state.
“But it’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come,” Blinken said in a statement.
“Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marshaling 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 – democratically, economically, and militarily.”
The Russian foreign ministry immediately seized on the announcement, calling it an admission of failed U.S. policy toward Russia.
“They won’t tell you the reason,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “But it is simple - the failure of the anti-Russian course of the Biden administration. 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.”
Nuland will be replaced temporarily as under secretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country. He is currently the undersecretary of state for management.
U.S. officials said the favorite to succeed Nuland in a permanent capacity is the current U.S. ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, a one-time Pentagon official who also served as then-Vice President Biden’s deputy national security adviser.
Russian oil depot hit by Ukraine as Kremlin bans fuel exports
Russians are feeling the effects of Ukrainian strikes on oil infrastructure “in their pockets” as a depot in the Kursk region became the latest site to be targeted.
Russian officials said that the depot in the region which borders Ukraine exploded after it was hit early on Sunday morning.
“Fire brigades and emergency services are working at the scene of the incident,” said Roman Starovoyt, the regional governor on Sunday morning.
He did not specify which oil depot was hit or its size.
The attack is part of a Ukrainian strategy to strike oil and gas facilities across Russia which the British Ministry of Defence said has forced the Kremlin to ban fuel exports for six months to try to dampen price rises.
“It is likely that Russia’s refining capacity had been temporarily reduced by multiple uncrewed aerial vehicle strikes against refineries across Russia,” it said.
Russia’s fuel export ban, introduced on March 1, follows a similar three-month ban that came into place in mid September. The ban last year was triggered by Russian farmers who threatened to protest unless the Kremlin brought fuel price rises under control.
Fuel prices in Russia have risen by around 10 per cent this year after several drone attacks on oil and gas facilities, including a strike on major chemical export infrastructure near St Petersburg and refineries on the Black Sea and central Russia.
The Kremlin has blamed fuel price rises on market fluctuations but commentators on Russian regional news websites have complained that people are “feeling it in their wallets’” and even Russian energy insiders have linked shortages to attacks on infrastructure and the effect of Western sanctions.
Anastasia Bunina, deputy director of the Gainful oil company, told the Irkutsk news website that the drone attacks were pressuring the industry just as it was trying to cope with the breakdown of an oil refinery at Nizhny Novgorod that usually refines 5 per cent of Russia’s fuel because of a lack of spare parts from the West.
“The second factor is the drone attacks on southern factories,” she said. “Their products were mainly exported, but nevertheless there are certain declines in production.”