After a summit that didn’t seem to offer much of substance a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping that maybe at least these sorts of vindictive and counterproductive stunts would be dialed back, if nothing else. But just days after the summit, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that another round of sanctions regarding Alexey Navalny would be forthcoming against Russia. Now, earlier this week, the State Department issued an advisory warning Americans not to travel to Russia for any reason. The advisory stated that Americans risked possible unjust imprisonment, terrorism, and all manner of horrible actions that could befall them if they visited that vast hellacious land. I’m surprised the advisory didn’t include a warning about something my mom’s former neighbor said he heard about in Russia: that there is a trapdoor you open that leads into hell somewhere in the country.

By Marcy Winograd & Medea Benjamin, Responsible Statecraft, 5/26/21

Democrats might control the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government right now, but a small Republican-dominated Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Coalition exercises outsized influence in a frightening campaign for nuclear rearmament. 

The coalition, comprising six senators from states that house, develop, or test underground land-based nuclear weapons, is pushing a wasteful and dangerous $1.7 trillion, decades-long plan to produce new nuclear weapons, some with warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While the 1980s witnessed the nuclear freeze and a mass movement to demand nuclear disarmament between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the 1990s gave birth to the missile caucus, the Congressional engine careening the U.S. into a renewed nuclear arms race.

All but one of the members of this caucus is a Republican from a deep red state — including North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and South Dakota — that didn’t vote for Joe Biden. Members of the Senate ICBM Coalition are Co-Chairs John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.); John Barrasso (R-Wyo.); Steve Daines (R-Mont); Mike Lee (R-Utah); and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

The lone Democrat, Tester, a third-generation farmer and former elementary school music teacher, wields a critical gavel as Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, a committee that will write the appropriations bill for military expenditures. Tester told the D.C.-based Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance this year that he was committed to keeping new nuclear weapons production “on track.”

Read the full article here.

Above starts at around the 1 hour and 15 minute mark.

You can also read the official English transcript provided by the Kremlin here.

Link to full interview now available here.