A new book details why future historians may well identify Putin’s landmark March 1 speech as the ultimate game-changer in the 21st century New Great Game in Eurasia
PODCAST: More Lost Opportunities to Diminish the New Cold War (Stephen F. Cohen)
Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments are at TheNation.com.) Three little-noted developments unfolded during the G20 meeting in China last week, as Cohen explains…
PODCAST: Prof. Stephen F. Cohen Talks With NYC Radio’s John Catsimatidis
Stephen Cohen, who is also a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, accused Trump’s critics, particularly Democrats, of preferring the possibility of impeaching the president to avoiding war.
The Far Right in Ukraine During the “Euromaidan” and the War in Donbas (Ivan Katchanovski)
This paper analyzes the role of far right in the Ukrainian politics during the “Euromaidan”and the war in Donbas. The issue of the involvement of Ukrainian far right organizations in the “Euromaidan” and the war in Donbas have been politicized and polarized.
Peter Beinart: NATO Doesn’t Need More Defense Spending
America’s NATO partners don’t need to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, let alone 4 percent. And the fact that some of America’s most prominent progressive politicians and journalists think they should underscores just how detached liberal foreign policy has become from the values liberals supposedly prize.
The Cold War Is Over (Peter Hitchens)
Despite the fact that Moscow has abandoned control of immense areas of Europe and Asia, self-appointed experts insist that Russia is an expansionist power. Oddly, this “expansion” only seems to be occurring in zones that Moscow once controlled, into which the E.U. and NATO, supported by the U.S., have sought to extend their influence.
PODCAST: Scott Horton Talks With Peter van Buren
Peter van Buren discusses the media reaction to President Trump’s recent meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
Annual Address of President Poroshenko to the Verkhovna Rada
In his annual address to the Ukrainian parliament, oligarch-President Poroshenko made it clear Kiev has no intention of fulfilling Minsk in the order which was originally agreed upon, claiming that “we have convinced our western allies and partners that any political settlement must be preceded by apparent and undeniable progress in security issues: sustainable ceasefire, withdrawal of Russian troops and equipment from the occupied territories, disarmament of militants and finally, restoration of control over our border.”
The Week: Why do Democrats want another Cold War?
The only good explanation for surging liberal hostility towards Russia is resentment. Hillary Clinton lost an election to perhaps the least attractive candidate ever fielded by a major political party despite having more resources, financial and otherwise, at her disposal…
The Perils of Alliance: Lithuania Sends Ammunition To Ukraine To Fight Russia-Backed Separatists
Lithuania has supplied Ukrainian troops fighting Russia-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country with 150 tons of ammunition.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin: IT’S TIME FOR A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE ON RUSSIA
Any Russian interference is only a small part of the “election meddling” we should care about…
My advice to Theresa May as a former ambassador to Russia (Sir Anthony Brenton)
On Ukraine, her message that Russia must observe the Minsk agreement would have more effect if she could undertake to say the same to the Ukrainians.
An Update from the Center for Citizen Initiatives’s Sharon Tennison
Dear CCI Friends,
Please excuse my absence in reporting during these days surrounding the Trump-Putin Summit. It was critical to take “time out” to re-energize. In order to continue with my increasingly unmanageable workload, I’ve hired CCI’s first staff person since 2009. Maddelyn Bryan, a recent graduate from the University of San Francisco joined CCI on July 1 to train with me as CCI increases its programmatic work beyond what we’ve done during the past ten years.
CCI, to my knowledge, is the only organization in the field of citizen diplomacy between the US and Russia that has remained intact and working since the beginning of the 1980s. By the end of the ‘80s, other organizations closed their doors. We switched from plain goodwill travel programs to training young Russians how to survive in the radically different conditions of the 1990s. This was when the new Russia literally fell apart.
We ran a dozen major programs during the 1990s and 2000s to support the “new Russia” by training their brightest and best young entrepreneurs in American companies and NGOs. We designed our own programs which for two and a half decades, we received large U.S. State Department grants to carry out these first-ever programs (that we devised) between the two countries. See ccisf.org. That period ended in 2004 when USG funding was cut to support the Iraq war. After that young Russians paid fully for CCI’s U.S. trainings until 2009 when the U.S. financial crisis bled into Russia and many had to temporarily close their businesses. Sadly, I let 30 staff members go, closed our Presidio offices and began writing my book, The Power of Impossible Ideas; Ordinary Citizens’ Extraordinary Efforts to Avert International Crises.
Since 2009 I’ve kept relations alive in both countries by traveling around Russia doing long-term evaluations of Russian alumni’s US trainings. Still they credit their US experiences as being “life changing.” As a result, we have dedicated alumni in 71 regions of Russia and the same types of American contacts exist in 45 states. With the Ukraine crisis bursting forth in 2014, I began taking a few American delegations to Russia as fact-finders and understood by the end of 2017 that classic citizen diplomacy must be restarted.
Citizen diplomacy, people’s diplomacy, soft diplomacy … whatever one terms it, may be the only action that can shift the extremely dangerous dynamic between U.S. policy makers and media and the Russian government and their media. If so it will need to be done in large numbers. We did large numbers earlier; it can be done again.
CCI ran two former 1980s programs this year to check their efficacy for the present time: 1) We sent delegations of Americans to several regions in Russia to explore dozens of aspects of Russian life and attitudes toward their leadership and America, and 2) we brought small delegations of Russian citizens here to the U.S. to interact, answer hard questions and to create goodwill with American audiences across four states and Washington, DC. Both program types proved to be extraordinarily successful and welcomed by both American citizens and Russian participants. The only place we ran into challenges was in Washington, D.C.
We are now projecting increased numbers of both types of people’s diplomacy for 2019.
If you might consider traveling to Russia on one of our 2019 “signature” trips; or if you would ever consider bringing four Russian entrepreneurs from multiple regions to your area for discussions and goodwill for four days, please get in touch with us asap! We will give you more details.
Sharon Tennison
Founder and President (since 1983)
Center for Citizen Initiatives
ccisf.org
Russian, Japanese leaders express new resolve to settle island row (Reuters)
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday spoke of their joint resolve to settle once and for all a territorial row over a string of tiny islands that has marred ties for more than seven decades.
VIDEO: The Real News: Aaron Mate Talks With Prof. Stephen F. Cohen
President Trump’s warm words for Vladimir Putin and his failure to endorse U.S. intelligence community claims about alleged Russian meddling have been called “treasonous” and the cause of a “national security crisis.” There is a crisis, says Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, but one of our own making.
US Arms Makers Invest in a New Cold War (Jonathan Marshall)
Behind the U.S. media-political clamor for a new Cold War with Russia is a massive investment by the Military-Industrial Complex in “think tanks” and other propaganda outlets, writes Jonathan Marshall.
The Hill: Rand Paul blocks Sanders’s Russia resolution, calls it ‘crazy hatred’ against Trump
“The hatred for the president is so intense that partisans would rather risk war than give diplomacy a chance,” Paul said.
Stalinism Again (Paul Robinson)
There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the alleged rehabilitation of Josef Stalin’s reputation in Russia.
PODCAST: Professor Stephen Cohen on the Helsinki Summit
US President Donald Trump provoked shock and alarm in the US by choosing to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial that Moscow interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.
Moscow Rules (Editorial, The National Interest)
Something dangerous is happening in the American media.