American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Good thing I checked…

The simmering fighting in Ukraine has led to a false sense of complacency in the West that this conflict might be drifting into a frozen state. It is far from intractable, but the past several months have imposed a fog of cognitive dissonance that will be rudely pulled back, either when Moscow loses patience, or perhaps worse, control. If the West does not return its attention to Ukraine and take an active role in managing the conflict, a resumption of the war is likely.

An MIT national security scientist says the New York Times pushed a “fraudulent” analysis of last April’s “sarin” incident in Syria, part of a troubling pattern of “groupthink” and “confirmation bias,” writes Robert Parry.

This is not an encouraging speech. It lacks humility and self-reflection. In this respect, it is exactly what one would expect from a politician: self-reflection isn’t patriotic; it certainly isn’t a vote winner.

This article first appeared as part of the Bow Group’s research paper titled “The Sanctions on Russia.”

Britain’s foremost expert on Russian and European politics, Professor Richard Sakwa, has precisely articulated why all attempts to resolve the crisis in Ukraine have ended in failure:

“The Ukraine conflict is the child of the cold peace. Although there are profound internal contradictions in the Ukrainian model of state development, these would not have assumed such disastrous forms if the geopolitics of post–Cold War Europe had been sorted out earlier.”

Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age.

It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail.  I’m tantalized by the cover article.  “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sat down with The National Interest magazine for a wide ranging interview in July. Kissinger notes that, with regard to the Ukraine crisis “One has to analyze how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization.”

An NSA document purporting to show Russian military hacker attempts to access a Florida company which makes voter registration software is sent anonymously to The Intercept. A low-level NSA contractor, Reality Winner, is arrested almost immediately. What’s wrong with this picture? A lot.

Professor Paul Robinson takes a look at a new report by the British think tank, The Bow Group, which notes that “Given that many people in Ukraine actually consider themselves to be Russian, and that the justifications for sanctions may have shifted, it appears necessary to revise our approach to what could be considered one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century.”

Video footage of last weekend’s so-called Rally for Truth in Washington, DC.

At the “March for Truth” in Los Angeles, which I attended, the main theme was that Trump had committed treason; Soviet-era and homophobic iconography was appropriated to portray Trump as a “puppet” who has sold out the American people on behalf of his Russian benefactors.

The Democrats’ demagogic use of Russia-gate to “resist” President Trump is putting progressives in league with warmongers and war contractors while postponing a serious assessment of the party’s political problems, warns Norman Solomon.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), pressed twice by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for evidence, said she still has seen none that would show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.