American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Kiev had an eventful week. On Wednesday, a global cyber attack, launched from Ukraine, spread like wildfire globally. While all of this was happening the head of the Kiev regime’s counter-intelligence was blown to pieces as his car passed through an intersection in the center of the city.

Prime Minister Aleksandr Zakharchenko gave a press conference on September 12, 2015 to explain the plans of the government of the Donetsk People’s Republic to hold district and municipal elections on October 18…according to Zakharchenko “Local elections are planned in accordance with the Constitution and legislation of the Donetsk People’s Republic. These totally and completely comply with the letter and spirit of the Minsk agreements.”

A recent Harvard Harris poll found a majority of Americans want the government to concentrate on issues like healthcare and the economy, rather than the endless Russia investigations spawned from the media frenzy.

Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, asks: Are Western Values Losing Their Sway? Here’s my two cents:

The problem with our “Western values” is not the values in themselves, although some are certainly questionable. The real problem is the triumphalism that came with them after the West’s ‘victory’ at the end of the Cold War, a dangerous triumphalism that continues today. We have utterly convinced ourselves that everyone else wants what we have and we will use any methods, from the most bloody and overt, to the most quiet and covert, to pass them on.

As anyone who has ever visited Lviv can attest, events glorifying those who collaborated with the Nazis are deemed perfectly normal there. They are even widely commercialized.

A general settlement with Moscow that results in Ukrainian neutrality, but allows self-defense forces and permits Moscow to retain sovereignty over Crimea, will not necessarily result in a full “capitulation”—even if Washington must lower its sights as to what can and cannot be negotiated in Moscow’s view.

Ever since the defeat of their preferred candidate in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post has been engaged in an extensive ‘hissy fit’ and disinformation campaign that greatly exaggerates and even outright manufactures the story of significant Russian influence in the campaign.

A recent New York Times editorial castigated Russia for arming the embattled Assad regime and deploying military personnel to Syria. It’s increasingly evident that the Kremlin is deepening its military presence in Syria to prop up a Syrian government that hovers near collapse and has lost control of large parts of its domain.

Yet the editorial’s assessment of Russian conduct in Syria is suffused with naiveté and conceit.

One of America’s biggest problems in dealing with Russia today is the pressure on policymakers to decide on a course of action without a good understanding of our rival and its motives, goals and priorities.

Sen. Lindsey Graham may have been wrong about pretty much everything related to the Middle East, but at least he has the honesty to tell Americans that the current trajectory of the wars in Syria and Iraq will require a U.S. re-invasion of the region and an open-ended military occupation of Syria, draining American wealth, killing countless Syrians and Iraqis, and dooming thousands, if not tens of thousands, of U.S. troops.

Nation contributing editor and ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. Pointing to the torrent of American political and media denunciations of Russian President Putin’s increasing of Moscow’s longstanding military support of the Assad regime in Syria, along with Putin’s dramatic offer to join the US-led air war against ISIS in Syria, Cohen concludes that Washington seems to prefer an Islamic State takeover of Damascus to any cooperation with Putin’s Russia.

Many comparisons have been made between Russia-gate and the earlier scandals of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but the similarities are at best superficial, explains Robert Parry.

Russia’s ongoing military buildup in Syria poses a serious challenge to American policy in the region. What response will best advance American interests in Syria and, more broadly, in the Middle East? That depends in large part on what Russia hopes to achieve.

This wide-ranging interview includes discussions of Mr. Pozner’s parents’ activities in the French Resistance in World War II, the Pozner family’s emigration to the USSR, the Khrushchev Thaw, the reaction of Soviet society to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, space bridges between American and Soviet societies….

Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false.