News

Fossil fuel-rich Russia may not be known as a leader on climate action – but in the country’s remote far east, authorities have launched an unexpected experiment: an effort to try out carbon trading and reach net-zero planet-heating emissions by 2025.

Move highlights European bloc’s divisions over how to handle Kremlin as relations fray.

The full budget, set to be released on May 3, should spark heated debate in Congress between an emboldened progressive wing of the Democratic party looking to cut defense budgets, and Republicans and conservative Democrats who say spending must increase to stay ahead of the Chinese military buildup.

Nuclear weapons are emerging as one of the top political brawls in the brewing battle over next year’s defense budget.

Gorbachev told the Interfax news agency that the two leaders  – who spoke by phone after Biden’s inauguration last month – should meet and discuss further arms curbs.

The Biden administration sanctioned seven mid-level and senior Russian officials on Tuesday, along with more than a dozen businesses and other entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attackon opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his subsequent jailing.

As a veteran U.S. diplomat, William J. Burns led secret negotiations with Iran and Libya over their weapons programs, served as ambassador in Jordan and Russia, oversaw U.S. relations with the Middle East and then ascended to the highest levels of the State Department.

Today we are posting two recent speeches by the presidents of the U.S. and Russia that might serve to illuminate the differing approaches each takes toward international affairs. These very different statements might also point to the underlying differences that remain a cause for the ongoing difficulty in achieving a less strained, more productive US-Russia relationship.

We must start with diplomacy rooted in America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.

We all know that competition and rivalry between countries in world history never stopped, do not stop and will never stop. Differences and a clash of interests are also natural for such a complicated body as human civilisation. However, in critical times this did not prevent it from pooling its efforts – on the contrary, it united in the most important destinies of humankind.

On Feb. 24, join The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to discuss Elisabeth Eaves’s newest piece “Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?” featuring Elisabeth Eaves, ACURA’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and arms control expert Thomas Countryman.

Opponents of the pipeline in Congress are increasingly impatient with the administration to enforce sanctions on the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline.

Countries are lining up for supplies of Sputnik V after peer-reviewed results published in The Lancet medical journal this week showed the Russian vaccine protects against the deadly virus about as well as U.S. and European shots, and far more effectively than Chinese rivals.

On Friday, the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) published a symposium on US-Russia relations on our flagship website USRUSSIAACCORD.COM featuring a distinguished panel of Russia experts, diplomats, peace activists and journalists, including Ambassador Jack Matlock, Georgetown University Professor Anatol Lieven, the award winning filmmaker Cynthia Lazaroff, and the scholar David C. Speedie, among many others. Please check out our website and read it all.

“…feel-good moralizing and domestic slogans are not foreign policy,” Armin Laschet, who is premier of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said in an interview that focused on understanding his little-known views on international affairs.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.

The American Committee for East West Accord has become the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord (ACURA), a renaming that better describes the clear focus on improving the bilateral relationship in challenging times. Today we are pleased to announce several distinguished additions to our Board: Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director of The Nation; Anatol Lieven, professor of international relations at Georgetown University; Cynthia Lazaroff, award-winning documentary filmmaker and author; Christopher Charles Dyson, executive vice president of the Dyson-Kissner Moran Corporation; and Krishen Mehta, Senior Global Justice Fellow at Yale University. [Read more…] about Announcement: ACEWA is now The American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Russia may consider returning to an international pact allowing surveillance flights over military facilities if the United States reverses its exit, the top Russian diplomat said Tuesday.

President Joe Biden is assembling a national security team with an unusually ambitious agenda to negotiate new arms control treaties, scale back the nuclear arsenal, and review decades of military doctrine.