Does your memory go way back to the ancient history of 2014? If not let me refresh your mind. I did a search on this blog of posts about Victoria Nuland.

Here are a couple of snippets from the first two results.

The first is from the post Trump’s Possible Path Out of Ukraine Crisis.

Exclusive: The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 sparked a New Cold War with Russia, but a President Trump could roll back tensions with a creative strategy for resolving the Ukraine standoff, writes Jonathan Marshall.

The second one is from the post US Pretends to be Shocked at Our Own Claim That Russia is Hacking Our Elections.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

Do you think the Russians laugh up their sleeves whenever we claim to be so upset that we think they meddled in our recent election? Might they think it is poetic justice?

Glenn Greenwals has created this YouTube video Greenwald: The White House’s game-playing denials of bio labs in Ukraine.

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald examines United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland’s vague answer about whether or not Ukraine has biological weapons facilities.

Watch this now before this is prohibited from being viewed in the USA.

The Gray Zone has the this episode VIDEO: Russian UN ambassador responds to US ‘war propaganda’ in interview w/Grayzone

Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal speak with Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitri Polyanskiy on escalated tensions on the Russian-Ukraine border, US accusations of an imminent Russian invasion, and the context missing from a US media that refuses to interview Russian officials.

Whether you believe the Russian Ambassador or not probably depends on your preconceived notion. I know it has an impact on me. At least I recognize that Polyansky represents the Russian point of view, even if my own historic experience since 2014 is somewhat aligned with what he is saying. Unlike most of my readers, Max and Aaron know who Victoria Nuland is. I keep trying to remind people, but it probably is ignored by most.

Consortium News has posted the article US Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine.

But the U.S. and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The U.S. coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of U.S. and NATO military trainers.

Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

This part of the story has been wiped from the minds of most people in the USA. I have the nasty habit of remembering things I am supposed to forget. That is one of my purposes for recording these things on this blog.

Counterpunch has the article Why ‘Russian Meddling’ is a Trojan Horse.

A great article bringing together many factors with links to supporting articles. It is hard to pick just one example to quote. Here are two disparate quotes to just give you a hint of what is in here.

In 2013 the Obama administration ‘brokered’ (Mr. Obama’s term) a coup in the former Soviet state of Ukraine that ousted the democratically elected President to install persons favorable to the interests of Western oligarchs. At the time Hillary Clinton had just vacated her post as Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State to prepare for her 2016 run for president, but her lieutenants, including Victoria Nuland, were active in coordinating the coup and deciding who the new ‘leadership’ of Ukraine would be.

And this one more directly addressing the title of the article.

More than a year later, no credible evidence has been put forward to establish that any votes were changed due to ‘external’ meddling.

With regard to Victoria Nuland and where she came from politically, here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia article. She served in both Democratic and Republican administrations – Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

She served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Foreign Affairs has the article Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault. The magazine won’t let me see the full article, but here is an excerpt from the part they let me read.

For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the final straw.

To see what part the USA played in the overthrow, look up Victoria Nuland on this blog.

Here is one link to an article you will find in the above search – U.S. officials caught in Ukraine plot.

Truth Dig has posted authorized excerpts of Oliver Stone’s interview – ‘The Putin Interviews’: Excerpt. One issue that I have blogged about numerous times is the U.S. backed coup d’état in the Ukraine.

VP: Remember how the Ukrainian crisis unfolded. [We’ve discussed it.] The three foreign ministers of European countries were acting as guarantors of an agreement between the opposition and President Yanukovych. Everyone agreed to that. President Yanukovych even agreed to hold early elections. At that time, at the initiative of the United States of America, they told us, ‘We ask you to prevent President Yanukovych from using the armed forces.’ And they promised in their term they were going to do everything for the opposition to clear the squares and the administrative buildings. We said, ‘Very well that is a good proposal. We are going to work on it.’ And as you, know President Yanukovych didn’t resort to the armed forces. But the very next day the coup d’état took place during the night. We didn’t have a telephone conversation, we didn’t get a call, we simply saw them [the Americans] actively support those who perpetrated the coup d’état. And we could only shrug our shoulders. Such conduct, the way the Americans acted, even among individuals is absolutely unacceptable. They should have at least told us afterwards that the situation had spun out of control. They should have told us that they would do everything to put them back on a constitutional track. No, they didn’t do that. They started to come up with lies saying that Yanukovych had fled. And they supported those who performed that coup d’état. How can we trust such partners?

OS: Question—is this when Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State, had that conversation with the American ambassador and said, “Fuck the EU”?

VP: Well, it doesn’t matter, honestly. It was on February 21st. Or maybe the 20th. The coup d’état took place the next day. So now that Crimea has become a full fledged part of the Russian Federation, our attitude towards it changed drastically. If we see a threat to our territory, just as any other country, we will have to protect it by all means at our disposal. I wouldn’t draw an analogy with the Cuban Missile Crisis, because back then the world was on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse. Thankfully, the situation didn’t go as far this time, even though we did indeed deploy our most sophisticated, our cutting-edge systems, for coastal defense.

I actually thought that Oliver Stone mischaracterized the Victoria Nuland remarks, so I searched my previous posts about Ambassador Nuland.

I found one, U.S. officials caught in Ukraine plot, that seemed to corronorate Stone’s take on what she said.

In addition, it showed that the U.S. is contemptuous of the role of its EU partners, who are also imperialist rivals.

The very next one I found, NYT Revamps Its False Ukraine Narrative, sort of explains wjhy I thought Stone was wrong.

The Ukraine crisis really emerged from the European Union’s offer of an association agreement that President Yanukovych was initially inclined to accept. But it was accompanied by harsh austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund, which would have made the hard life for the average Ukrainian even harder.

Because of those IMF demands and a more generous $15 billion loan offer from Russia, Yanukovych backed away from the EU association, angering many western Ukrainians and creating an opening for U.S. neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, to urge on protests to unseat Yanukovych

That last blog post had a link to the article, EU Association Agreement with Ukraine Is a Gift to Kleptocrats, that explains what was wrong with the EU offer to the Ukraine.

Knowing all this makes the Putin remarks very credible. More credible than the fiction that the U.S. government and corporate press has tried to sell us.

Consortium News has the article Trump’s Possible Path Out of Ukraine Crisis.

Exclusive: The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 sparked a New Cold War with Russia, but a President Trump could roll back tensions with a creative strategy for resolving the Ukraine standoff, writes Jonathan Marshall.
.
.
.
The other major obstacle is hostility from militarist hardliners in the West who propose arming Ukraine to ratchet up conflict with Russia. Prime examples include the State Department’s chief policy maker on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland; former NATO Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, who became infamous for issuing inflated warnings about Russian military operations; Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain; and Stephen Hadley, Raytheon board member and former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, who chairs the Orwellian-named United States Institute for Peace.

When was the last time that a corporate news story mentioned the “U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine”? How could they forget? At the time “the State Department’s chief policy maker on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland” promoted this coup, the corporate press reported it. However, as long as they bury that information now it is as good as it never having happened. Most of the public doesn’t have the long term memory to remember this as long as the corporate news keeps suppressing it. There are people alive today who weren’t even born when this coup happened in 2014.

The US government is planting what is probably a phony story about Russia trying to hack our election computers. They quote numbers of hack attempts against certain computers without giving you context. They don’t tell you that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers all over the world probing every computer they can find on the internet to see if they can break in. My own irrelevant web site is probably attacked thousands of times a day. I have protection for that web site that tells me about it if I should ask. Otherwise it just keeps itself occupied in fending off these probes.

What shocks the US, purportedly, is that Russia would interfere in our politics, as if the US is not doing that all over the world itself.

Doesn’t anybody remember Victoria Nuland?

From Consortium News we have the article The Mess that Nuland Made.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s “regime change” in early 2014 without weighing the likely chaos and consequences. Now, as neo-Nazis turn their guns on the government, it’s hard to see how anyone can clean up the mess that Nuland made, writes Robert Parry.

Now you may wonder what Victoria Nuland has to do with Hillary Clinton. Well Consortium News has the article The War Risk of Hillary Clinton.

The outstanding example is Victoria Nuland – Clinton’s spokesperson at State and now Assistant Secretary of State for Europe – who has aggressively spearheaded the anti-Russian crusade. Previously, she had been principal deputy foreign policy advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney.

OK, so maybe the average citizen doesn’t have time to read and remember all these events. Surely yjr corporate news media that has covered these stories must have some memory of what they have reported. Why do they never think the back story is relevant? How can they report with a straight face the war propaganda and distraction from real problems that the administration and Hillary Clinton are engaged in?

Consortium News has the article The Case for Pragmatism by Robert Parry.

There is always a fixation about getting rid of some designated “bad guy” even if the result is some “far-worse guys.” This has been a pattern repeated over and over again, from Libya to Sudan/South Sudan to Ukraine/Russia to Venezuela (just to name a few). In such cases, we see the neocons/liberal hawks release a flood of propaganda against some unpleasant target (Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi/Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir/Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych/Russia’s Vladimir Putin/Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro) followed by demands for “regime change” or at least punishing economic sanctions.

There is an awful tendency of the opposition party in this country to look at a bad situation, and demand that the party in power “do something”. As long as the party in power does not “do something”, they are under constant pressure from the other party. I think this is what leads to the driving force for “doing something” even if it is worse than “doing nothing”. Until a better idea is presented, sometimes “doing nothing” is exactly the something that needs to be done.

Parry also brings up some information that seems to have been neatly wiped from people’s minds in this country.

Toss into this volatile mix of a Europe seemingly close to explosion the Obama administration’s “neocon/liberal interventionist” policies toward Ukraine, where neocon holdover Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland helped orchestrate a 2014 coup to remove democratically elected President Yanukovych after he was demonized in the U.S. mainstream media as corrupt.

In sum total, Robert Parry makes the case against what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoted, and he doesn’t even mention her by name or by office. He also makes the case for a foreign policy that Bernie Sanders might get behind if it weren’t so politically dangerous to do so. Even Bernie Sanders has his limits on how much he dares tell the American public that has been infected by the oligarchs propaganda for so long.

I shouldn’t leave you hanging without at least a little taste for what Robert Parry sees as solutions.

So what can be done? As dark as the gathering economic storm may be, one silver lining could be that Americans and other Westerners will finally begin pushing back against the powerful neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist fellow-travelers.

Perhaps, instead of President Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal being a one-off affair that may barely survive a determined neocon assault in the U.S. Congress, it could become a model for pragmatic approaches to other international crises. The core of this pragmatism would be that one doesn’t have to love or even like the leadership of another country to cooperate on global concerns, whether they are economic, geopolitical or environmental.