Facebook informed Congress in newly released documents that it could not prove or disprove collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russians who may have used the online platform to try to sway opinions during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Washington DC vs Warsaw: Reflections on the Current Tensions (Peter S. Rieth)
The present tensions between Washington DC and Warsaw over the Polish constitutional crisis are a function of the unfortunate policies of both governments regarding plans to increase American military presence in Poland. If Warsaw did not insist on this increase, the United States would have little interest in Poland’s internal political partisanship. [Read more…] about Washington DC vs Warsaw: Reflections on the Current Tensions (Peter S. Rieth)
Fred Weir: Politics over peace? Critics say Ukraine’s president sidelining Minsk accords.
President Poroshenko is set to sign a bill that will redefine the conflict between Kiev and Eastern rebels. But the goal of the legislation seems to be less about ending the fighting and more about winning upcoming elections.
Why Ukraine needs Russia more than ever (Nicolai Petro)
The destruction of Ukraine’s industrial base, which is heavily concentrated in the east, shifts the balance of economic and political power to the western regions, permanently marginalising opposing political voices…This is not a policy that the west can endorse.
Patrick Lawrence: Washington can’t adjust to losing its role as global sheriff, and the entire world must bear the consequences
The Trump administration announced still more sanctions to punish Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis and its reclamation of Crimea after the U.S.- cultivated coup in Kiev four years ago. These cover nine companies and 21 people, all either Russian or citizens of the Ukrainian provinces rebelling against the post-coup government in Kiev.
Putin’s Bite is Worse than His Bark – should we have been surprised? (Peter Hitchens)
Excerpts from a House of Lords EU subcommittee report on Russia notes that “Moscow feared that the 2010 Kharkiv Agreements, which had extended the Russian Navy’s lease of Sevastopol as a base for 25 years from 2017 until 2042, would be renounced….On 1 March 2014, three former Ukrainian Presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv Agreements.”
Leonid Bershidsky: The U.S. List of Russian Oligarchs Is a Disgrace
The U.S. Treasury Department spent six months compiling lists of Russian political leaders and “oligarchs” as required by last year’s sanctions legislation. The end result is a bizarre cut-and-paste job where some of the inclusions, and some of the omissions, make little sense.
Beyond a New Cold War (John Pepper)
The threats of terrorism, failed states and civil wars cannot be resolved without respectful collaboration between Russia and the United States, says the former CEO of Procter & Gamble and ACEWA Founding Board Member John Pepper. Pepper’s remarks were delivered on a panel, “Beyond a New Cold War?” on February 17th in New York City on a panel co-sponsored by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and ACEWA.
Meduza: Russian officials respond to new ‘Kremlin list’
Meduza collects some of the first reactions from Russian officials appearing in the news and on social media.
Russian hostility ‘partly caused by west’, claims former US defence head (The Guardian)
The current level of hostility in US-Russian relations was caused in part by Washington’s contemptuous treatment of Moscow’s security concerns in the aftermath of the cold war, a former US defence secretary has said.
Edward Lozansky: The poor state of U.S.-Russia relations does not serve American interests
Why is the U.S. so adamant about maintaining a permanent adversarial relationship with the one country on the planet with which it is imperative America carry on a constructive dialogue?
Ukraine `Running Out of Time’ to Resolve Political Crisis (Bloomberg)
Ukraine’s parliament speaker said the nation is “running out of time” to resolve its political crisis, reiterating calls for a government shake-up to end months of infighting that’s jeopardizing the flow of international aid.
Paul Robinson: Fear-mongering, Pure and Simple
‘Russia is ready to kill us by the thousands’. So reads a headline in today’s Daily Telegraph, one of Britain’s leading daily, allegedly high-brow (i.e. non-tabloid), newspapers.
Notions of ‘Russian threat’ are nothing more than new Cold War rhetoric (The Independent)
Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, writes that a “truly cooperative approach to conflict resolution on a realistic basis has no sound alternatives.”
Leonid Bershidsky: Release the Dutch Evidence of the DNC Hack
Specific evidence linking Russian intelligence to the DNC hack would dramatically change the current picture of limited attempts at interference via Facebook and the state-owned network Russia Today, especially if it could also be shown that material obtained in that Russian hack surfaced on Wikileaks. It serves no purpose to keep that kind of information from the public.
PODCAST: Kiev Increasingly Resembles an American Colony (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.) With Kiev sinking into political and economic crisis, Washington is pushing for the American Natalie Jaresko, currently Ukraine’s Finance Minister, to replace the immensely unpopular Yatsenyuk as prime minister.
Cohen asks why a country of some 40 million citizens has to appoint so many foreigners to high-level government positions. As a result, Kiev increasingly resembles an American colony or dependency. That the Western-backed “Maidan Revolution” for “independence,” in February 2014, may be in its death agony, with Ukraine mired in civil war and in economic ruin, was dramatized, Cohen reports, by a top European Union official’s recent statement that the country could not even aspire to EU membership, the professed goal of the Maidan leadership, “in the next 20-25 years.” Nearly 10,000 people have died and millions been displaced for a purpose that was ill fated and unwise from the outset. In the U.S., only “Putin’s Russia” is blamed for the tragedy, but Cohen argues that the Obama Administration and EU leadership are equally, if not more, responsible.
Batchelor asks if long-standing Russophobia is driving Washington’s fervent opposition to cooperation with Moscow both on Ukraine and now, in regard to the partial ceasefire, on Syria. Cohen thinks that Russophobia, which can be traced to Tsarist pogroms and the arrival of many Jews in America before the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the revival and intensification of such sentiments during the preceding forty-year Cold War, clearly play a role. But, he adds, the current US demonization of Putin is an even more important, virulent, and largely unprecedented factor.
Meanwhile, the Russian Communist Party, long a minority opposition in the post-Soviet parliament, or Duma, is showing new strength among voters as a result of the economic hardships due to the collapse of world prices for Russia’s energy and, to a lesser extent, to Western economic sanctions imposed in connection with the Ukrainian crisis. The extent to which this might affect Russian politics and the role of the new parliament to be elected in September remains to be seen. But how seriously Putin takes this potential challenge was indicated by his scathing public attack on the historical role of Lenin, the founder of the Communist Party, in January, essentially for the first time. Cohen and Batchelor discuss various aspects of this new development in domestic Russian politics, especially now as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union and 100th anniversary of the Revolution approach.
Paul Robinson Review’s Amy Knight’s Orders To Kill
Knight is a respectable author whose 1993 biography of Beria I found quite informative. In Orders to Kill, however, she has abandoned academic neutrality in favour of political activism. The result is far from satisfactory.
ISIS THREATENS ‘APOSTATE PUTIN’ IN NEW PROPAGANDA VIDEO (Newsweek)
Islamist group Islamic State (ISIS) has threatened “Putin the apostate” with an imminent attack on Russian soil in a new propaganda video. Since Russia began air strikes on ISIS and other anti-government targets in Syria during the last week of September 2015, there has been a concentrated anti-Russian backlash from the group
Norman Solomon: Remembering Investigative Journalist Robert Parry
What made Bob Parry a trailblazer for independent journalism also made him a bridge-burner with the media establishment.
UN SAYS SYRIA PEACE TALKS TO BEGIN WITHIN DAYS (AP)
The U.N. envoy for Syria will begin holding “substantive” talks between the Syrian government and the opposition no later than Monday.