American Committee for US-Russia Accord

“The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said to me recently, over the phone. Lewis was present for that one, too: he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial minutes before King did. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He added, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”

A major report by Senator Ben Cardin suggests a broad response to Russian interference in the West. Only some of his recommendations make sense.

Frédérick Lavoie is an independent journalist from Quebec, who speaks Russian and has spent his career reporting on the countries of the former Soviet Union. His new book Ukraine à fragmentation(which unfortunately is only available in French) takes the form of a long letter to Artyom, a real four year old boy from Donetsk who was killed by a Grad rocket in January 2015.

Brian Milakovsky, a Fulbright scholar who is working with an aid organization on the Ukrainian side of Donbas, told me the Javelins would provoke Russia to escalate its military involvement and dramatically deepen suffering on both sides.

Do nuclear weapons help keep us safe? Or do they threaten our very existence? Rhetorically, American presidents endorse the latter proposition, routinely expressing their commitment to nuclear abolition. In practice, however, they opt for the former, investing large sums of money to maintain and refurbish the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

New evidence that Washington broke its promise not to expand NATO “one inch eastward” – a fateful decision with ongoing ramifications – has not been reported by ‘The New York Times’ or other agenda-setting media outlets.

Americans are being told that the virtuous course in Syria is to fight the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian partners. We are supposed to hope that a righteous coalition of Americans, Turks, Saudis, Kurds, and the “moderate opposition” will win.

This is convoluted nonsense, but Americans cannot be blamed for believing it.

Ten months have passed since Ukraine imposed a full economic blockade of the part of the Donbas under Russian and separatist control. What has it meant for Ukraine’s economy and for the prospects of the territories’ economic and social reintegration?

It was a convenient myth for the Syrian opposition and its outside backers to claim that neither the Syrian army nor the Russians were fighting Isis. “The Russians say they want to destroy Daesh [Isis] but they are not bombing Daesh: they are bombing the moderate opposition,” said the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who retains a touching belief in the existence of a powerful moderate faction.

Disappointment—extreme disappointment—marks what the year 2017 has been in US-Russian relations. The relationship is stuck. The hole in which it is stuck is deep and dark—and growing more so. Each side had hoped for better.

For Biden and other westerners, the 1990s was simply a decade we need not mention or remember. For Russians, it can’t be forgotten.

he Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom presents viewers with a story of everyday citizens facing down brutal riot police controlled by Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The colorful array of activists, artists, scarf-wrapped babushki, bearded priests and fresh-faced students makes it appear as if Ukraine’s people from all walks of life in participated in the Maidan uprising. But some are missing—neo-Nazis, who were edited out.

Ending an Obama policy of isolating Moscow, the top military leaders of NATO and Russia are planning to meet in Azerbaijan later this month.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continued their weekly discussions of the New Cold War. (Previous installments are at TheNation.com.) Cohen points out that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev confirms what Cohen has been arguing for nearly a decade: Washington and Moscow are in a New Cold War more dangerous than the preceding one.

Cohen asks why, if Pope Francis can establish a detente with his counterpart in Moscow after a 1,000-year schism, President Obama cannot do the same with Putin. Instead, US-Russian political relations are growing worse and more militarized. In Ukraine’s civil and proxy war, the political crisis of the US-backed Kiev government, fueled by Ukraine’s rapacious oligarchs, has deepened. In Syria, Putin’s successful strategy of militarily bolstering Assad’s army in order to defeat ISIS and its affiliate (“moderate”) terrorist movements, while evidently acknowledged by Secretary of State Kerry and many European officials, is the target of fierce defamation by Washington’s powerful war party which opposes Kerry’s diplomatic approach both to the Syrian and Ukrainian crises.

Still worse, two American allies, Saudi Arabia and NATO member Turkey, are considering sending their troops (illegally) into Syria to fight Assad’s ascendant army, thereby risking military confrontations both with Russian and US “special-ops” boots on the ground. (This axis of Washington hardliners, Turkey and the Gulf Sheikdoms, Cohen observes again, appears to regard Putin and Assad as a greater foe than Middle East terrorist armies Turkey and Saudi Arabia have abetted for years.) The conversation ends with Cohen pointing out that among Republican presidential candidates, only Donald Trump has proposed a kind of detente with Moscow, while the others advocate, in their bellicose bumper-sticker pronouncements, escalating the military confrontation with Russia on all fronts, from Europe to the Middle East. Meanwhile, debate moderators continue to fail to press them on these perilous international issues.

The United States and Russia seem to be returning to an arms race they halted a generation ago.