American Committee for US-Russia Accord

While the Biden Administration calculated that China would buckle down at Alaska –  because that is China’s history under Western pressure – it apparently calculated that the Kremlin elites could be “incentivised” in Iceland.

A timely and fascinating panel discussion on the Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy featuring ACURA’s Cynthia Lazaroff and Katrina vanden Heuvel…and many more.

News of the Biden-Putin summit is a rare positive signal amid an otherwise doom and gloom atmosphere as U.S.-Russian relations have sunk to historic lows.

The two men represent two countries with a lot of tensions right now – but also areas of real potential cooperation.

It is not perhaps coincidental that the 19 May meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took place in Reykjavik on the occasion of the meeting of the Arctic Council, an eight-country [Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, United States] grouping formed in 1996 to further cooperation on the Arctic region.  In his opening remarks, Secretary Blinken listed “Arctic issues” along with arms control and climate as items for discussion.

With the two sides expressing a broad willingness to cooperate, despite deep-seated policy differences, the Blinken-Lavrov meeting could set the tone for a possible summit between Biden and Putin later this summer.

It has taken a long time to overcome intellectual and bureaucratic resistance to the Soviet atheist legacy because, whereas on the one hand this was a suppression of freedom of choice, on the other hand, the secularization of society was also deemed to be an indication of social progress among Western intellectuals.

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.

David Swanson of Talk World Radio talks to The Nation’s and The American Committee for US-Russia Accord’s Katrina vanden Heuvel on US-Russian relations.