American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) challenges the constitutional authority of President Joe Biden to involve the United States militarily as a co-belligerent or belligerent with Ukraine in its war with Russia and to defend every inch of NATO territory without a declaration of war by Congress.

As calls grow for a ‘victory’ over Russia, we should examine whether such a win-lose outcome is even possible.

Journalist and author Robert Wright talks with historian Marlene Laruelle by what Putin means by “de-Nazifying” Ukraine and whether most Russians support the war. They conclude with a discussion of whether the war was avoidable.

As effective as Zelenskyy has been in drumming up Western support, Ukraine’s message has been far less compelling to audiences in the Global South, where many countries have declined to join Western campaigns to sanction Russia’s economy and isolate it diplomatically.

How did Putin become Putin? Amb. John Evans talks with the John Quincy Adams Society about the future Russian leader when he was just a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Evans, then serving as consul general, shares his recollections of the young Putin, situates this in the broader Russian political situation in the 1990s and the evolution of U.S.-Russian relations from the optimism of the period to today’s bitterness.

Ukraine is not Vietnam or Afghanistan — Russia is not going to leave what it believes to be a key national interest without a fight.

Ukraine invasion is not the first conflict Western governments have used to showcase weapons to potential buyers.

 

 

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure?

Neither Foer nor The Atlantic, where he works, responded to repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson at Slate, for which—disclosure—I’ve written, said, “The very basic journalistic best practice and principle of not sharing drafts of stories with the people and institutions we cover is a standard we ascribe to.”

As Americans ingest the constant feed of dire reports and heartbreaking photographs from the war in Ukraine, it behooves us to look at Europe’s views of a European conflict.  [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: David C. Speedie: The Folly of Isolating Russia

If there is indeed a shift in strategy to another level of confrontation with Russia, we need to know what we’re getting into.

When it came to the Ukraine conflict, Professor Michael J. Brenner did what he’s done his whole life: question American foreign policy. This time the backlash was vitriolic.

Indications of trouble both within Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia have long been apparent. Unfortunately, many in the West failed to discern the warning signs, much less recognize their significance.

Before the war, I had no real connection to Poland. My friend Melanie’s grandparents were Polish, and some years ago she’d visited and came home with pictures of the church in the village where they were married.

I’d made a brief trip to Warsaw in the early 1990s, on at TDY [Temporary Duty] assignment from the American Embassy in Moscow. While almost every detail of the trip is blurred and gone, I do retain a visceral memory of the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science, completed in 1955, the year before I was born.

With its elaborate combination of Russian Baroque and Gothic styles, the “Palace” was instantly recognizable as a pompous version of Stalin’s “seven sisters” towers built in Moscow after the war. A gift from the Soviet Union to the people of Poland, Warsaw’s iteration was built from the rubble of a city devastated by the Nazis. Hitler ordered his army to raze as it retreated from Warsaw; nearly ninety percent of the city was destroyed. Then, by 1955, it was rebuilt. [Read more…] about ACURA’s Bernadine Joselyn: My Path to the Polish-Ukrainian Border

“I am,” says Macbeth, “in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” We had better step back before we step any further.

Not wanting to start a third World War is a prudent, appropriate policy objective, but if that’s the goal, the administration is taking the long way around, because whether they admit it or not, the US is, and has been for some time, a co-belligerent in the war.

As the Russia-Ukraine war opens a new phase in the Donbas, scholar Richard Sakwa notes the absence of diplomacy; the Western media’s veneration of Zelensky; the European Union’s self-implosion over the war; and the crackdown on dissent in both Ukraine and Russia.

In this interview, he describes the current state of U.S.-Russian relations; his perceptions of Putin and his decision-making; his views on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union more broadly; the importance of history to understanding Russia; the current successes and failures of the Harriman Institute; his research on Nikolai Bukharin, alternative paths in the development of Russian history, reform, and alternative political science descriptions for the Soviet era, among many other topics.

 

How the uncivilized Russia-Ukraine divorce exploded into full scale warfare.

To explain the crisis, corporate news networks are leaning on hawkish ex-military officials — without disclosing their current defense industry ties.