US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland spent two days in Moscow meeting with top foreign policy officials at a pivotal moment in bilateral relations when peace and war seem to hang in the balance. Nuland was a lead US point person for the Ukrainian crisis from 2013 to 2017 as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and has since been seen in Moscow as a sworn enemy or Russophobe, guilty of engineering the overthrow of pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. In 2019, it became known Nuland was blacklisted by the Russian authorities and banned from entering Russia. This made the planning of Nuland’s visit to Moscow a precarious business. The Russian government eventually agreed to issue her a visa, since Nuland today is a confirmed top State Department official, but also demanded and received in return a similar concession from Washington: a US visa for Russian foreign ministry’s arms control and disarmament expert Konstantin Vorontsov, who has been banned from visiting New York to participate in UN activities since 2019 (Kommersant.ru, October 14).
A War and Peace Visit to Moscow (Pavel Felgenhauer, The Jamestown Foundation)
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