American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Much is being made about the ostensibly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Russian propaganda machine.

Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. Cohen points out that instead of cooperating with Moscow’s air war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Obama Administration is threatening to send US planes and possibly troops to counter the Russian military operation there, while also stepping up NATO ground, air and sea exercises in areas on Russia’s own borders

Beijing is gaining energy-leverage in the region that is comparable only to that which Moscow enjoyed during the Cold War.

Following this year’s unnaturally dry summer, wildfires of an intensity not seen in decades have roared across the shores of Russia’s Lake Baikal. At their peak, they raged across nearly 150,000 hectares of land, an area roughly equivalent to that of the Houston metropolitan area. Greenpeace Russia estimates that over the course of July and August alone, up to 1.5 million hectares burned — that is, over 5.5 thousand square miles.

The image of Siberia burning is deeply unsettling, especially given its reputation as one of the coldest places on earth. Though wildfires in the region occur each year, their recent size and severity reveal broad ecological stress in the region. Of equal concern is Lake Baikal’s declining water level, which in early 2015 dropped below critical levels for the first time in more than three decades.

If the latest stories in the Western press are to be believed, those dastardly Russians are responsible for turning a piece of anti-Russian propaganda into a viral video on social media. Curse them for their cunning!

Military and media reports hyped the Zapad military exercise as a major threat. In fact, what took place was nothing as dramatic as the West’s warnings would have led you to believe.

Spearheaded by actor and director Rob Reiner and Atlantic senior editor David Frum, CIR’s advisory committee, which includes war-hungry neoconservative scholar Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, political scientist Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and former National Intelligence director James Clapper….

Appointment hearings for Jon M. Huntsman and A. Wess Mitchell were wholly in line with the beltway consensus on Russia.

Bloomberg View’s Leonid Bershidsky reports “Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden…Europeans too are involved in shaping the way Ukraine is governed, not just because they are donors — the U.S. is more important in that respect because of its influence on the IMF…”

They might have saved everyone a lot of time if they had simply said, “Kissinger, si, Kennan, no.”

Isis evidently does not have any doubts about the Russian air strikes being aimed at itself and cannot have done so since the raids started on 30 September, because an operation such as getting a bomb on to a plane at Sharm el Sheikh airport would take weeks to set up. There is a further misunderstanding about the Russian attacks on Isis and other salafi-jihadi armed groups in Syria. They are much heavier than anything being carried out by the US-led coalition, with 59 Russian strikes on one day recently compared to the US launching just nine.

Why, unlike during the preceding 45-year Cold War, is there no significant American mainstream opposition to the new (and more dangerous) one? Cohen poses this question as a kind of paradox for tonight’s discussion…

There’s a lot to unpack about the newly formed Committee to Investigate Russia, which aims to “help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.” Perhaps its most striking feature is that no Russia experts are involved; that’s a sign of the times.

The misrepresentation of Russia’s stated objectives in Syria and the Russian population’s reaction to President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in the war-torn country continues in U.S. mainstream media and think tanks

When alarms began to ring and a control panel flashed in front of Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel seated in a secret bunker south of Moscow, it appeared that the world was less than 30 minutes from nuclear war.