American Committee for US-Russia Accord

On October 29, just before meeting with China’s President XI Jinping, President Trump posted on the right-wing social media network Truth Social that “because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”

The U.S. stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992 – that is, detonating nuclear warheads. It regularly tests “delivery vehicles,” the missiles that would be used to carry the nuclear weapon to its intended target. The most recent of these tests took place early on Wednesday, November 5, when an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast of California. It’s possible that Trump simply does not understand the difference between these two things.

In March 2014, the late Senator John McCain of Arizona stood on the Senate floor and declaredthat “Russia is now a gas station masquerading as a country.” He repeated this characterization the following year on CNN’s State of the Union, elaborating that Russia was merely “a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) echoed this sentiment, calling Russia “an oil and gas company masquerading as a country.” In time, public intellectuals would commonly describe Russia as “gas station with nukes” as a way to dismiss it as an economically hollow petrostate propped up only by natural resources and inherited Soviet nuclear weapons.

Under what conditions do you think the war in Ukraine can end?

Right now, Russia is moving slowly with its meat grinder towards Pokrovsk, the major city that would give it leverage to take over the rest of the Donbas, if it chooses to do so. If they stop there, then we might be able to get a ceasefire. But, in my view, they want to push forward. And Zelenskyy says: No, we’re not going to let them get it, and we’re going to fight for two to three years more. So I honestly can’t give you an answer, unless President Trump and China begin to put more pressure on both Russia and Ukraine to pull back, and they can do that if they really want to.

 

Question: It has been reported that Vladimir Putin’s next meeting with Donald Trump in Budapest did not happen because even the US Administration realised that you are not ready for talks on Ukraine. What went wrong after the Anchorage summit that inspired hope for the launch of a genuine peace process? Why does Russia remain adherent to the demands that Vladimir Putin put forward in June 2024 and on what issues сould you make a compromise?

Sergey Lavrov: The understandings reached in Anchorage was an important milestone in the search for a long-term peace in Ukraine through overcoming the consequences of the violent anti-constitutional state coup in Kiev organised by the Obama administration in February 2014. The understandings are based on the existing reality and closely bound to the conditions of just and lasting resolution of the Ukrainian crisis proposed by President Putin in June 2024. As far as we know, those conditions were heard and received, including publicly, by the Trump administration – mainly the condition that it is unacceptable to drag Ukraine into NATO to create strategic military threats to Russia directly on its borders. Washington also openly admitted that it will not be able to ignore the territorial issue following the referendums in Russia’s five historical regions whose residents unambiguously chose self-determination apart from the Kiev regime that labelled them as “sub-humans,” “creatures,” and “terrorists,” and chose reunification with Russia.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — European Union officials warned Ukraine on Thursday that it must keep cracking down on graft in the wake of a major corruption scandal that could hurt the country’s ability to attract financial help. But they also offered assurances that aid will continue to flow as Kyiv strains to hold back Russia’s invasion.

LONDON — Ukraine is being shaken by one of the biggest wartime corruption scandals since Russia’s invasion three years ago, after investigators raided the homes of top officials and a former business partner of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as part of an investigation into an alleged sprawling corruption scheme in the country’s energy sector.

From censoring a report on CIA domestic surveillance to running cover for the Contra War to helping launch the war on terror, Dick Cheney dedicated his life to making sure the US national security state could kill, spy, and torture with few checks.

Magical thinking, case number 1: Ukraine can win its war against Russia, and do so without the United States and its NATO allies becoming full-fledged belligerents in the conflict.

Prrogressives who reviled him this week need to acknowledge how close their own views came to Cheney’s in the last years of his life.

Almost four years after the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine faces the twin challenges of not having enough troops and men avoiding military service.

With the imposition of new U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s dismissal of visiting Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev as a “propagandist,” the Trump administration’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine seem to be hanging by a thread.

There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hope high and economic and military support flowing.

ACURA’s Nicolai Petro is Professor of Comparative and International Politics at the University of Rhode Island and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine.

When he saw a group of Soviet soldiers on the street in East Berlin, Los Angeles Rams offensive lineman Irv Pankey had an idea.

He wanted a fur hat, and offered an NFL-branded cap in return.

“The guy, he was cool about that, and the rest of it is history,” Pankey said.

Until the end of last year, the agreed policy, as stated by then incoming Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, was that

“the British Government must leave the Kremlin with no doubt that it will support Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory. Once Ukraine has prevailed, the United Kingdom should play a leading role in securing Ukraine’s place in NATO”.

I have heard this formula endlessly in the last three or four years. Can the noble Baroness tell us whether this is still the policy of the British Government? If not, why not? That policy, to my way of thinking, was always dishonest and in fact, morally repugnant, since we were never going to give Ukraine all it takes for victory, for the very good reason that any such policy carried an unacceptable risk of escalation. I am really worried by the insouciance of those noble Lords speaking today who talk about unleashing long-range missile attacks on the most heavily armed nuclear power in the world.

There has been a great deal of confusion about why it is so difficult to achieve a ceasefire, and why Russia insists on a comprehensive peace settlement that deals with “the root causes” of the crisis.

Movies have long played a significant role in shaping our understanding of the perils of nuclear war. As a teenager, I was stupefied by On the Beach (1959), the cinematic portrayal of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel about the extermination of human life in Australia as a lethal radioactive cloud drifts from the Northern Hemisphere (where it was generated by a cataclysmic nuclear war) to the South Pacific. Next came Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), still the most powerful dramatization of nuclear war’s utter madness. The Day After, a made-for-TV film from 1983, provided gruesome images of a nuclear war’s deadly consequences for members of a small Kansas community.

It started back in 2017. Congressional Republicans were trying to trace the FBI, CIA, and other agencies’ activities in what is often known as the “Russia hoax.” One central focus was the Steele dossier, the collection of false and salacious accusations that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

President Donald Trump’s October 29 announcement that the United States will restart nuclear weapons testing after more than 30 years marks a dangerous turning point in international security.

The decision lacks technical justification and appears solely driven by geopolitical posturing.

Trump’s impulsive and ignorant statement about resuming nuclear testing was truly terrifying. Not because it would blow up the CTBT, which the U.S. has never ratified but, like Russia and China, continues to adhere to but because it reflected how little understanding Trump has about nuclear weapons and their use and  because it shows how recklessly impetuous Trump is. The reality is that the U.S. is nowhere near ready to begin underground nuclear testing. It would probably take the U.S. three years to get ready to test and the U.S., with its stockpile stewardship program, has no need for such testing, which would only trigger similar moves by Russia and China and others, who actually would benefit from such testing far more than the U.S. would.

The fact that Trump doesn’t even understand that tests of new delivery systems is not the same thing as a nuclear weapons test, which only North Korea has undertaken this century, is also flabbergasting. The thought that this fool has the power to effectively end life on the planet is truly staggering and incomprehensible.

The timing and announcement of Russia’s recent tests of the Burevestnik missile and Poseidon torpedo were partly in response to Trump’s mockery of the Russian military as a “paper tiger” and partly in response to his cancellation of the Budapest meeting with President Putin, who has also proposed extending the New START treaty for another year while negotiations continue. They were also partly in response to Trump’s “Golden Dome” fantasy. As Putin emphasized, much like he did in his original announcement on March 1, 2018, these systems, like the Oreshnik, which Russia deployed last November, can all circumvent U.S. missile defense. Former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster said the U.S. wouldn’t have a counter to the Oreshnik for at least 15 years. That is probably true for all these systems. It is time for the U.S. and Russia to hold strategic security talks as the world has been demanding.

–Peter Kuznick, Professor of History at American University