American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Wess Mitchell, a Russia hawk and president of the Center for European Policy Analysis is a top candidate to be nominated to the post of assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Mitchell, a vocal Putin critic, also worked on Europe issues at the John Hay Initiative, a neoconservative-leaning policy shop….

In a recent piece of blissful, indeed bestial ignorance…Michael Weiss plies his ‘journalistic’ hand to Russia – in particular, its opaque North Caucasus and mujahedin – with less than sterling results….Weiss is the editor of The Daily Beast – a very fitting title for a venue featuring such work.

Communication channel between Washington and Moscow to be suspended immediately.

The slightly fetid “phony war” in Ukraine—the unsettling stagnation noted in this space a month ago—is emphatically over. Suddenly there is movement on several fronts, and some of it is promising. But this is a dangerous moment, too, chiefly because Washington’s bet on the post-coup government in Kiev, bad from the outset, is on the brink of producing a result so ugly and shameful its consequences all around cannot now be calculated.

How did people jump to this conclusion that Bernie Sanders, by opposing Democrats, must ipso facto be working at the behest of Russia? It wasn’t entirely organic. And it points to how fake news can infect some of our brethren on the left.

Whether it’s Reuters or the anti-Putin tabloid The Daily Beast, every headline today about the meeting between newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, reads the same…

Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new cold war. This installment focuses on different but related recent developments. According to Cohen, by summoning Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President François Hollande made clear that the US-backed government in Kiev, not Moscow, is blocking implementation of their Minsk plan for negotiating an end to the Ukrainian civil war.

It is not clear whether Trump’s enemies really believe that his Russia policy is a risk to US national security or whether Russia – because it can still inspire such fear in American minds – is being used as an emotive stick to beat him with.

Host and scholar Pietro Shakarian talks with Proffer Teasley about her late husband Carl Proffer, the founding of Ardis Publishers, the origin of the Ardis name, and her personal experiences with Russian literary giants Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Elena Bulgakova, and Lily Brik, among others.

Two months ago, a number of senior U.S. national-security officials insisted that the Russian Federation has reemerged as the premier existential threat to American interests. Today, as energy prices continue to tumble and China’s economy falters, a new narrative has emerged: the pending collapse of Russia itself, or at least the prospects that the government of Vladimir Putin is entering into its last days.

The continuous oscillation in views—Russia as a powerful threat, Russia as an imploding basket case—does not permit a cool, rational assessment of Russia’s actual strengths and weaknesses.

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal explains that these sanctions punish Russia and Iran unnecessarily intensifies the conflict between the US and these countries.

Oliver Stone joined Tucker Carlson to discuss his new four-hour documentary on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. presidential election, and intelligence agencies’ “hostility” toward President Donald Trump.

The $3.6bn debt deal announced on August 27 by Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance, where private bondholders agreed to take a 20% writedown on the face value of $18bn in government debt, is very good news. Yet it’s not a done deal and the final sum that will be restructured will almost certainly be less than the headline figure.

Excellent media round up of the unrest roiling Kiev by the website NewColdWar.org which trenchantly examines “two news reports from Western media sources on the clash. The reports come with typical, misleading Western media phrasing describing as “separatists” the people of eastern Ukraine who are resisting the civil war launched by the governing regime in Kyiv in April 2014.

Yasha Levine, author of the forthcoming Surveillance Valley, talks to radio host Doug Henwood about Russia, anti-Russia hysteria, and the latest NSA leak.

While most analysts agree that the deal buys time for the authorities in Kiev, the terms of the deal seems to favor the lenders over the Ukrainian government. Goldman Sachs noted that the likelihood that bondholders would vote against the bond restructuring was small “given the attractiveness of the offer relative to market expectations.”

In return for a four-year extension on payments of the remaining debt, Ukraine agreed to a higher coupon (interest rate) of 7.75 percent, up from 7.25 percent. Further, after the four-year period expires in 2019, Ukraine will be obliged to spend 40 percent of any GDP growth over 4 percent on debt repayment.