American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Excerpt from ACURA founder Stephen F. Cohen’s talk on his book “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War” at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Policy.

Reports indicate that after months of fighting, the Russians have taken the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. This comes at a time when world leaders are pledging more aid and weapons — including sophisticated, American-made F-16s — to Ukraine in hopes that its armed forces will be able to mount a much anticipated counteroffensive this spring.

The journalist and editor Kelley  Vlahos asked the two top Russia experts at the Quincy Institute — Anatol Lieven and George Beebe — for their candid takes on what this apparent victory for Russia really means, and how it might change the war’s landscape.

Why not spare the people of Ukraine further bloodletting and negotiate with Moscow for peace while Ukraine still possesses an army? Unfortunately, to be effective, diplomacy requires mutual respect, and Washington’s effusive hatred for Russia makes diplomacy impossible. That hatred is rivaled only by the arrogance of much of the ruling class, who denigrate Russian military power largely because U.S. forces have been lucky enough to avoid conflict with a major power since the Korean War. More sober-minded leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols should urge a different course of action.

A February analysis of the European refugee issue by the Council on Foreign Relations found that “tens of billions of dollars” in humanitarian aid were poured into Ukraine’s neighbors during the war’s first year. “As the conflict enters its second year with no end in sight,” the report says, “experts worry that host countries are growing fatigued.”

The G7 Leaders’ 2700-word statement on Ukraine, issued in Hiroshima after their summit meeting glossed over the burning question today — the so-called counter-offensive against the Russian forces.

Hiroshima has long been a breeding ground for euphemism, dating back to when Harry Truman announced the city’s obliteration merely as having “destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.” That tradition is not dead, as demonstrated by the Washington Post in a report on this weekend’s G-7 meeting in the relevant city, which its reporters describe as having been “severely damaged” eight decades ago by an American nuclear bomb. Good to know!

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Executive Director Daniel Hogsta responded to the statement “This is more than a missed opportunity. With the world facing the acute risk that nuclear weapons could be used for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, this is a gross failure of global leadership. Simply pointing fingers at Russia and China is insufficient. We need the G7 countries, which all either possess, host or endorse the use of nuclear weapons, to step up and engage the other nuclear powers in disarmament talks if we are to reach their professed goal of a world without nuclear weapons”

Unnoticed among the trove of documents in the Pentagon leak is this account of how a miscommunication between a Russian pilot and his base came perilously close to starting World War III.

Barring an improbable complete victory for Ukraine or Russia, the conflict in Ukraine will end, or more likely be suspended, in the form of a compromise. The fighting is therefore now essentially about the geographical and political lines along which this compromise will be drawn. These will become much clearer once the results of the forthcoming Ukrainian counter–offensive are known, and the aftermath of the offensive will be the time for an intensive diplomatic effort to bring about a ceasefire.

Ideally, this compromise should take the form of a peace settlement like Northern Ireland’s in 1999, that would end the war and allow the creation of a stable, consensual and peaceful security order in Europe. More likely, however, is a ceasefire that (as in the cases of Kashmir, Korea, and Cyprus) will freeze the existing battle–line, wherever that runs. Such a ceasefire will in any case be necessary if talks aimed at a formal peace settlement are to take place; and even if such a treaty cannot be reached, such a ceasefire, if far from ideal, might still prove reasonably stable and permanent.

In light of the revelations contained within the recently released Durham Report, we think it appropriate to note that ACURA founder, the late Professor Stephen F. Cohen was right (as he very often was) when he wrote that, “Russiagate and its promoters have become the gravest threat to American national security.”  What was true then, remains true today. – Ed.

The director of PEN Moscow is worried about Russophobia.

As the Heads of the Group of Seven (G7) gather in Hiroshima this week, one of only two sites to witness the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons use in conflict, over 200 leaders and experts from 50 states warn of the need to compartmentalise nuclear arms control from great power competition.

In a joint statement coordinated by the European Leadership Network and the Asia Pacific Leadership Network, some 26 former Foreign and Defence Ministers, six former Heads of State, over 30 former Ambassadors, multiple senior experts and scholars, and dozens of former senior officials, including former NATO Secretary-General, Assistant Secretaries-General, and Military Staff including Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (SACEUR) make a case for prioritising nuclear arms control.

In the darkest hours of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and United States were able and willing to discuss and agree measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war. This statement, endorsed by contacts in China, France, Russia, the UK and the US – all five recognised nuclear weapons states under the non-proliferation treaty – supports a return to this diplomacy, and protection of nuclear arms control as a global imperative.

An open letter calling for a swift diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine was published on Tuesday in the New York Times. The letter’s 14 signatories consisted mostly of former U.S. military officers and other national security officials, including Jack Matlock, Washington’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat; Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official; and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff.

The Washington Post reports: Brown University researchers, in a report released Monday, draw on U.N. data and expert analyses to attempt to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts “so vast and complex that” ultimately, “they are unquantifiable,” the researchers acknowledge.

The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “‘indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.

More than 7,000 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with more than 8,000 contractors, according to Brown’s Costs of War project. And U.S. forces have suffered cascading effects of their own, including rates of suicide among veterans outpacing the general population

If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain.

Economist James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations at the University of Texas, suggests that the draconian sanctions so proudly and confidently imposed by Biden and allies in the wake of the Ukraine invasion may have actually been of the greatest benefit to Russia, forcing structural reforms that Putin could not have imposed on his own.