American Committee for US-Russia Accord

It may be considered a singular success for Western statesmanship to have brought two old rivals for power and influence in Central Asia…The US, especially, missed opportunities to integrate both countries into a single world system, by rebuffing reforms of the International Monetary Fund that would have strengthened China’s decision-making influence, and by blocking Russia’s overtures for NATO membership. This led both countries to seek an alternative future in each other’s company.

The intervention in Russia’s civil war is a classic example of how the U.S. can be lured into doing something unnecessary and dangerous in a war in which it had nothing at stake to satisfy allies on the basis of shoddy information.

Filip Kovacevic, an Adjunct Professor at University of San Francisco, writes, that “pro-NATO discourse” has presented “NATO membership as the ultimate proof of Montenegro’s political and economic ‘development’ and ‘maturity’.”

Four months after the Minsk II accords, the Ukraine crisis continues to simmer, with occasional violent eruptions. The ceasefire in Donbass has not prevented some 1,000 people from losing their lives since February, adding to the previous fatality count of more than 5,000. Some of the heavy weapons that both sides should have pulled back from the line of contact are still positioned close to that line, and are active.

The idea that Vladimir Putin is going to be cowed into submission by shows of U.S. military strength or abandon defending what he believes are Russian security interests is naïve.

The U.S. Department of Defense reportedly has plans to place tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and other heavy weapons in the Baltic countries and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It is easy to see what this is about. It is an attempt to send a signal—a warning, of sorts—to Russia amid the continued tensions that events in Ukraine have heightened.

Alexey Navalny has become a media hero for protesting Putin’s corruption. But his own politics are downright Trumpy.

Some experts have also pointed out that the fraught state of relations between the US and Russia only adds to the risk of a nuclear conflagration—accidental or otherwise.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko died on April 1 at the age of 84. In April 1987, exactly 30 years ago, The Progressive published this interview with Yevtushenko by Katrina vanden Huevel (at the time assistant editor, and now editor and publisher of The Nation).

ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the broadening US-Russian cold war and confrontation over Ukraine. The main focus is on escalating challenges to the agreement reached by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Sochi in May to implement the Minsk plan for ending the Ukrainian civil war through negotiations.

Have the U.S. and Russia always been “enemies” as American political and media elites contend? History tells us otherwise.

On June 11, Ambassador Jack Matlock delivered the 2015 Fulbright Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. In it the Ambassador and ACEWA Founding Board Member observes that the Cold War ended by negotiation, not by the victory of one side. Nevertheless, the unfounded triumphalism by the “West,” and the exaggerated Russian reaction to it has produced a new, cold-war-type confrontation over the governance and orientation of Ukraine.

Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Princeton and NYU, Stephen F. Cohen, talks to Tucker Carlson about the largely evidence free allegations made by witnesses who appeared before the Senate Permanent Select Intelligence Committee on Thursday, March 30.