Victoria Nuland, the third-ranking US diplomat and critic of Russia's war in Ukraine, is headed for retirement

Victoria Nuland, the third-highest-ranking US diplomat and a frequent target of criticism for her aggressive views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will step down and leave her post this month, the State Department announced . State.

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 earlier, but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. . 2 place. Campbell took office last month.

Nuland had served at the US embassy in Moscow in the turbulent 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

She then became the US ambassador to NATO before being appointed to serve as State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during President Barack Obama's first term.

As the department's spokeswoman and later as assistant secretary of state for Europe, Nuland drew the ire of many Russian leaders for her outspoken defense of Ukraine, especially after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

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 US policy around the world under six presidents and 10 secretaries of state.

"But it is Toria's leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will be studying for years to come ," Blinken said in a statement.

"Her efforts have been necessary to confront Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to organize a global coalition to ensure his strategic failure, and to help Ukraine work toward the day when it will be in able to stand firmly on its own feet - democratically, economically. and militarily."

The Russian Foreign Ministry immediately seized on the announcement, calling it an admission of failed US policy towards Russia.

"They won't tell you the reason," spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. "But it's simple - the failure of the anti-Russian course of the Biden administration. Russophobia, proposed by Victoria Nuland as the main concept of the foreign policy of the United States, is dragging the Democrats to the bottom like a stone."

Nuland will be temporarily replaced as undersecretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the US withdrawal from the country. He is currently undersecretary of state for management.