Populist Talk, Populist Message, Substack, 5/29/25

History of early US Russia relations

The Revolutionary War –1775-1783—Catherine the Great significantly affected the outcome of the American Revolution through her diplomacy. Catherine’s diplomacy helped the US gain independence. Catherine, though her foreign advisor, Nikita Ivanovich Panin, remained officially neutral during the war. Russia refused to assist Great Britain militarily and insisted on peace talks that linked a resolution of the American Revolution with the settlement of separate European conflicts. Catherine’s insistence on diplomacy, at least indirectly, helped the Americans win the Revolution and gain independence.

The Civil War–1861-1865–Russia supported the Union during the Civil War believing that a unified US could act as a counter force to Europe–especially Great Britian. In 1863, the Russian Navy‘s Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, discouraging outside interference and preventing sudden attacks on Union port cities. To Tsar Alexander II, the main reason to support the Union was clear and it was that they were fighting on the side of emancipation and freedom. Tsar Alexander II was the Tsar that abolished serfdom in the Russian Empire and he believed that Lincoln shared his similar beliefs and championed the side of emancipation. This was one of the main reasons why the Russian Empire continued its support of the Union throughout the American Civil War.

The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1991— The communist takeover of Russia was opposed by the US and by most Russians. The philosophy of Communism was not indigenous to Russia, and Christian Russians were not aligned with the Bolsheviks. Communism extracted an enormous toll on Russia where an estimated 61 million Russians died from the various efforts to create a communist society. The USSR was peacefully dissolved on December 26, 1991. This marked the first time in history that an empire surrendered its empire without firing a shot. It also marked the end of communism.

The continuation of US militarism. The capture of Russia by communism, along with the occupation of Eastern Europe by the USSR after WW2, gave rise not only to the Cold War, but to many of the current tensions as well. The US did not disarm after World War 2 instead; the Cold War began, and US militarism was born. The old Cold War ended in 1991, but a new cold war began sometime after 2001 as the US, NATO and the CIA became more involved in Ukraine, but especially after the US backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. Meanwhile, US militarism continued even after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Russia is no longer a communist country. Russia is a mixed economy that is primarily capitalist in orientation. The Russian people suffered during the long and brutal transition from communism to capitalism that took place during the 1990’s. At least 7 million Russians died, but this disgraceful period is beyond the scope of this essay. For those interested, please see The Harvard Boys Do Russia. Since 2000 Russia has regained her footing economically and, on a purchasing power parity basis, is the 4^th largest economy in the world.

The second World War–The US and the then USSR were allies. The German defeat, and the destruction of the German Army by the USSR, in Operation Barbarossa, essentially won the war. Over 27 million Russians died in World War 2 including almost 9 million military personnel. Today, the entire west refuses to acknowledge Russia’s sacrifice and Russia is not even invited to attend memorials to this horrid war. Increasingly, historical references discount or eliminate the contribution of the USSR to the Nazi defeat.

Two of the largest military campaigns in history were fought on Russian soil. In both cases, the invaders were defeated, and the capital of the invading country was captured

Napolean invades Russia—In 1812 Napolean sent his “Grande Armee” of 651,000 men and arms to invade Russia. The idea was to force Russia to comply with Napolean’s demand of a continental blockade of the United Kingdom.. That army perished in Russia along with hundreds of thousands of Russia civilians. In 1814 a coalition, including Russia, defeated Napolean in the Battle of Paris, conquering Paris, and forcing Napolean to abdicate.

Hitler invades Russia–On June 22, 1941, Hitler sent the flower of the German military to conquer the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. For this campaign, the Germans allotted almost 150 divisions of about three million men. This included, 19 panzer divisions, about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. It was the largest and most powerful invasion force in human history. The Germans’ strength was further increased by more than 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops. This entire force was destroyed, crippling German’s war fighting power. The Soviet Army marched across Eastern Europe and from April 16-May 2, 1945 fought the Battle of Berlin in revenge for the suffering of the Soviet people. The city fell to the Soviets, and the Soviet flag was raised above the Reichstag.

What is the value of Russia’s resources?

Russia’s natural resources are estimated to be worth a staggering $75 trillion. Russia’s vast wealth is composed of a wide array of commodities, including crude oil, natural gas, coal, and rare earth metals. Russia also leads in developing the Artic and has vast timber and freshwater resources. This positions Russia as a major global player in the energy and resources sector. The scale of Russia’s resources impacts both the global energy markets and geopolitical dynamics. These resources are also unencumbered as Russia has very little debt. These facts also make Russia a target by highly leveraged economies searching for resources and assets.

The USSR (Russia) was promised that NATO would not expand eastward one inch

The promise of US Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward” has been documented by declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests.

Despite these promises NATO expanded. This is the history of NATO expansion: in 1999 NATO was expanded into The Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia), Hungary, and Poland. 2004 saw the largest increase in NATO members since the Alliance’s foundation. Perhaps even more notable, though, is that republics of the former Soviet Union were now joining (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Bulgaria (formerly of the Warsaw Pact) Estonia Latvia Lithuania Romania (formerly of the Warsaw Pact) Slovakia Slovenia (successor to Yugoslavia) In 2009, NATO’s foothold in East Europe grew firmer: with the addition of Albania (formerly of the Warsaw Pact), and Croatia (successor to Yugoslavia). The additions to NATO in 2017 and 2020 are successor states to Yugoslavia: Montenegro (in 2017) North Macedonia (in 2020). NATO was now at Russia’s doorstep, all that remained was Ukraine and Georgia and NATO would border Russia, including the areas that had been used in the past by European countries to invade Russia.

NATO and the US begins to conduct “exercises” with Ukraine along Russia’s border

Larry Johnson did a series on NATO exercises conducted, with Ukraine, along the Russian border. Many of these exercises mimicked a decapitation strike against Russia. They include: Understanding Military Exercises; The Road to War in Ukraine — The History of NATO and US Military Exercises With Ukraine — Part 1; The Road to War in Ukraine — The History of NATO and US Military Exercises With Ukraine — Part 2; The Road to War in Ukraine — The History of NATO and US Military Exercises With Ukraine — Part 3 Here’s Larry Johnson:

“The ten-year period — 2011 -2021 — marked a dramatic surge in the size of the Ukrainian military. Although the number of active-duty soldiers stabilized at 200,000 starting in 2018, the Ukrainian reserves grew by a factor of 10. These reserves were made possible by Ukraine’s annual military training with NATO and USEUCOM forces. The stage was set for going to war with Russia.”

The US/NATO knew that attempting to expand NATO to Ukraine would force Russia to intervene

A very strong case can be made that the US began the process of creating conditions for war with Russia as far back as 2008. Senior US government officials knew that the threat of adding Ukraine to NATO would be seen as a serious “military threat” by Russia, a threat that would crosse Moscow’s security “redlines” and could force it to intervene.

At the annual NATO summit back in 2008, the George W. Bush administration publicly called for adding Russia’s neighbors Ukraine and Georgia to the military alliance. NATO’s secretary-general declared that the two countries would eventually become members. But privately, US diplomats knew that this move would be seen as an existential threat by Moscow and could provoke Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Former US Ambassador to Russia William J. Burns, who later became CIA director, admitted in a classified 2008 embassy cable that NATO expansion to Ukraine crosses Moscow’s security “redlines” and “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

President Putin discussed these and other issues in an address he gave at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. It was a clear statement of Russian foreign policy including the need for multilateralism. Although the speech was mostly ignored in the West, some have compared it to the speech given by President John F. Kennedy at American University in June of 1963. Both were appeals for diplomacy rather than war.

Russia tries to avert war with the Minsk Agreements

In 2014, after the Maidan coup, a civil war broke out between Kiev and several eastern Ukrainian republics. This is a complex story but to simplify–in 2014 and 2015 agreements were entered into in Minsk, ie the Minsk agreements—aimed at restoring peace in the region by ending the separatist war. France and Germany were to oversee the agreements. Both Hollande and Angela Merkel have both admitted that the Minsk Agreements were designed to buy time for an arms buildup for Ukraine. Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists had been fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine since 2014 in a conflict that Kyiv says has claimed some 15,000 lives.

Russia proposes a new security treaty in December 2021

Despite the risk of war, Western leaders continued to insist that Ukraine would join the US-led military alliance. In December of 2021, Russia submitted a proposal for a new mutual security guarantees to the United States. At this very time, NATO was conducting another exercise in the Black Sea. The proposal was immediately dismissed by NATO and the US.

The US and NATO had apparently forgotten the words of President John F. Kennedy: “while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

On February 18, 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voiced alarm on Friday over a sharp increase in shelling in eastern Ukraine and accused the OSCE special monitoring mission of glossing over what he said were Ukrainian violations of the peace process.

February 22, 2022, Russia intervenes in Ukraine

Who provoked who? We have all heard the mantra that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was “unprovoked”, but there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Ukraine built significant fortifications in the Donbass and had been shelling civilian areas for several weeks. There were also fears that Ukraine was preparing a military campaign against the pro-Russian population of the Donbass. Russia argued that intervention was necessary to prevent the Donbass from being overrun. The fortifications are so extensive that Russia is still clearing these areas.

Sanctions on Russia. The US and the EU implemented extensive sanctions on Russiaincluding excluding Russia from the SWIFT clearing system and seizing over $300 billion in Russian assets. The belief was that the sanctions would crash the Russian economy and lead to the overthrow of President Putin. This did not happen. The Russian economy adapted and continued to grow.

The US has run this war. On March 25, 2025 the New York Times printed an enormous story titled: The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine. The US has provided the weapons and financial support to Ukraine, but the US and NATO assistance went much further. The Times story revealed a secret operation in Wiesbaden, Germany where US and NATO forces formed a partnership with Ukraine “…of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology that would become the secret weapon.” In this operation “…American and Ukrainian officers planned Ukraine’s counter offenses. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

In other words, the US and NATO were directly involved in killing Russian soldiers and Russia knew this was happening. This operation was supported by a finding signed by President Biden.

Conclusion– The US and Russia have a long very positive history going all the way back to the founding of our nation. We were allies in World War 2 even though Russia was in the grip of communism at that time. Russia is no longer a communist country. Why are we essentially at war with Russia today? The only possible reason is that Russia insists on being a sovereign nation and on using her resources to benefit her people rather than transnational financiers. Under the Wolfowitz Doctrine from 1992, the US is to act to prevent a rival power from arising in the EU, Asia or the former territory of the Soviet Union. Unless this doctrine is set aside it implies that the US will go to war with Russia and China–wars the US is unprepared to fight. This fact is demonstrated in these articles by Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin: The Return of Industrial Warfare (Jun 17 2022) The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine – RUSI May 2024 Battlefield Conditions Impacting Ukraine Peace Negotiations – Russia Matters, Apr 18 2025 republished by Responsible Statecraft: Ukraine’s battlefield position is deteriorating fast May 5 2025.

Certain people within the US and NATO acted to force Russia to intervene in Ukraine. The people of Ukraine have been used as a proxy so the US and NATO could safely confront Russia. Since February 2022 the Russian Federation has basically been at war with the United States and NATO. Russia has carefully conducted this war as a war of attrition designed to exhaust the US and NATO and force a new security architecture–and as the above essays discuss, this is a war Russia is winning. Russia has adapted to all the weapons provided Ukraine and continues to expand and improve her military technology, and her weapons. Military recruitment is strong in Russia and her people are united and quite angry at the insults, and the lies. Isn’t it time we made peace?

As Otto von Bismark noted–Russia is slow to saddle up but fast to ride. Russia is now riding very fast.

In the face of powerful interests, can President Donald Trump be the president of peace? Trump ran on the promise to be a “peace president”, specifically promising to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, stating in his inaugural address that he wanted to be known as “a peacemaker and unifier.”

Significant elements within the national security state are opposed to peace–not only in Russia, but in Iran and Gaza as well. Senator Lindsey Graham has split with the president and claims to have 81 Senators prepared to support more sanctions on Russia. The President has business before the Senate and needs their support.

There is also opposition to peace with Iran. AIPAC and Israel want the US to go to war with Iran and are demanding zero enrichment and a complete dismantling of nuclear energy. Iran says there will be no deal if this is the demand. Like with Russia, a US war with Iran is beyond current US military capabilities.

A term has been circulating on the internet–TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out. The term, coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong, has been used to describe how markets tumble when the President issues threats, usually over tariffs, then rebounds when Trump gives way. This phenomena, lucrative for traders in the know, is the subject of a story in today’s New York Times. Asked about the term President Trump lashed out at the reporter: “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the reporter. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”

President Putin recounts that he has dealt with 3 US Presidents, none of whom were able to carry out the promises they made. His conclusion? The president may change but US policy stays the same. Will this be the case with this president on the question of peace with Russia, Iran and Gaza?

At this moment in history–our lives may depend on the answer.

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 6/3/25

Jeff Childers is a lawyer and conservative writer based in Florida.

We are learning much more about why the Epstein disclosures might be taking so long. Yesterday, the Federalist ran an intriguing story headlined, “DOJ Officials Didn’t Know Database Let FBI Bury Russiagate Docs.” Oh, FBI.

According to the story, the FBI stores its evidence in a central document management system called Sentinel. It’s how anyone finds anything. For example, when special counsel John Durham searched for documents related to Russiagate, he used the Sentinel system. It is the only way to access the FBI’s stored evidence.

But the FBI’s permanent bureaucrats knew something that the political appointees didn’t. Sentinel has several layers of classification. These designations are used to protect classified information, conceal witness identity, and maintain operational security during investigations.

What John Durham and nearly everyone else at the Department of Justice didn’t know was that the FBI had built a top-secret, master-level code into the Sentinel system called “Prohibited Access.” Unlike “Restricted Access,” which shows that documents exist (but are locked down), Prohibited Access entirely hides their existence.

In other words, it returns false negatives in internal FBI searches— agents querying relevant terms would see nothing at all and think there is nothing. The only way to find a “Prohibited Access” document is to know exactly what you’re looking for and run a special search while logged into the specific case where the documents were saved.

According to Federalist sources, no one from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office ever mentioned to Durham that documents relevant to the investigation into surveillance of the Trump campaign were concealed by the “Prohibited Access” designation, even though FBI officials knew the DOJ was investigating the origins and handling of the Crossfire Hurricane case.

Now it becomes easier to understand why Peter Strzok and James Comer were so annoyingly arrogant during their Congressional testimony. They knew a secret. They knew that John Durham would never see the most problematic documents.

(Sounds like a job for DOGE’s engineers. Or maybe it already has been.)

If evidence was willfully concealed using database tools designed to frustrate discovery, it might be criminal. Options include obstruction of justice, fraud on the court, Brady violations (failure to disclose exculpatory evidence), or even civil rights offenses if this was part of a politically motivated prosecution strategy.

There is conceivable justification for some kind of Prohibited Access. One can imagine the need for total secrecy in some key cases, like if the FBI were investigating an FBI agent, or a Chinese spy. But those favorable arguments are blown out of the water by the singular fact that the DOJ didn’t know about it and the FBI didn’t tell them— even during an active investigation.

In a late-breaking story published this morning while I was writing this up, the Federalist reported that the U.S. Attorney tasked with investigating the Biden-Burisma connection confirmed he was not told by FBI about the Prohibited Access codes. He ran keyword searches in the Sentinel system for “Burisma,” “Zlochevsky,” and other related terms, and got nothing.

The FBI had its own secret invisibility code without any oversight. In other words, the Sentinel system has a built-in auto-redact switch designed to bypass the people in charge, effectively making FBI a rogue agency.

But “Prohibited Access” is now exposed as a key deep-state tool, perhaps one of the most insidious and darkly elegant weapons in the administrative arsenal. It appears legitimate. After all, it doesn’t destroy documents, leak emails, or fabricate evidence. It simply hides reality. Silently, permanently, without fingerprints.

It’s plausible deniability: “But you never asked for Prohibited Access documents.”

CONGRESS: “Why weren’t these turned over?”

FBI: “Your request didn’t include ‘buried under digital cement.’”

This story reanimates Donald Rumsfeld’s folksy term, “unknown unknowns.” The Federalist said not even FBI agents were aware of the Prohibited Access code. So only a cabal of trusted insiders knew, and it appears they weren’t inclined to share, even with their Constitutional bosses.

🔥 This is a scandal on par with the worst cases of intelligence abuse in American history.

In 1975, in Watergate’s wake, the Church Commission investigated CIA abuses. Congressional investigators uncovered a series of top-secret internal CIA memos hidden from anyone outside the Agency, even the President. The secret memos described decades of unconstitutional and criminal abuse. They pictured a CIA that was completely off the chain, describing domestic surveillance of journalists and dissidents, illegal wiretaps and mail opening, assassination plots against foreign leaders (like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Rafael Trujillo), drug testing on unwitting Americans (e.g., MK-Ultra), collaboration with the mafia (Castro assassination attempts), and infiltration of domestic political groups.

Inside the Agency, these protected memos were called the CIA’s “Family Jewels,” too dangerous to disclose to outsiders, too damning to destroy. (In other words, they were preserved as blackmail insurance against former CIA members, rogue presidents, or a recalcitrant Congress.)

In 1975, as the Family Jewels sparkled in the daylight, committee chair Frank Church prophetically observed, “If this government ever became a tyranny… the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

Indeed. The Family Jewels disclosures led to the only major reform of the intelligence agencies in history. From that scandal, we got Congressional oversight committees, the FISA court, and an executive order prohibiting assassinations. The debacle also led inexorably to the minting of the now-familiar term, “deep state.”

🔥 Like CIA’s “Family Jewels,” “Prohibited Access” is no longer a secret and has gone mainstream, even if corporate media is stubbornly ignoring the scandal. If the documents are anywhere in the database, they can be found. Who knows what could be there? Presumably (hopefully) it contains a lot of things that should be protected, like the aforementioned counterintelligence operations.

But how about other politically sensitive issues? How about the Epstein documents? Covid origins? January 6th? Hunter’s laptop?

If the Federalist’s article is to be at all believed, Kash Patel’s team is just now finding out about this. It could amount to nothing, or a few minor reforms. Or this story could ignite a nuclear-grade accelerant for Trump’s broader strategic disclosure doctrine.

By Ian Proud, Strategic Culture Foundation, 6/11/25

At the latest round of peace talks in Istanbul, Ukraine submitted a list of 339 children that it demands Russia returns. That’s a fraction of the number that Kiev alleges have been kidnapped since the war began. This speaks to the over-politicisation of children in this terrible war. But it also offers scope for helpful progress towards an eventual peace.

As a parent of beautiful children who I love more than anything, I find little more heartbreaking than the thought of children who are forced, petrified and upset, from their homes because of war. There have been widespread reports from the Ukrainian side that Russian has forcibly deported almost 20,000 children since the war began. This contributed to International Criminal Court decision in March 2023 to issue an arrest warrant against President Putin for alleged war crimes.

The detailed legal provisions on the treatment of civilians including children at times of war are laid out in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It requires systems to identify and register separated children, the consent of parents or guardians for temporary separation and prohibits the changing of family status and nationality.

The reality for children in war torn Ukraine has been both heartbreaking and complex. When you dig into the available western reporting, it appears that many of the ‘missing’ 20,000 are children who have moved to Russia or to Russian occupied Ukraine with a parent or relative, rather than being forcibly deported.

Since the war began there have been several negotiated returns of Ukrainian children including, in some cases, with mediation of third countries like Qatar. Ukraine recovered 1223 children in 2024 through dialogue with Russia, for example. Many cases of children returned to Ukraine have involved families separated during the invasion. In December 2024, five Ukrainian children returned of whom three had been taken to Russia by their parents. Likewise at the start of May, six children returned to Ukraine, at least three of whom had been with their parents.

A second problem relates to gaining parental consent. There are around 100,000 orphans in Ukraine most with living parents who abandoned them out of a lack of resources, or for other reasons including alcoholism, abuse and poor mental health. Ukraine itself has faced accusations about the widespread abuse and mistreatment of orphans in care, including from the BBC, since the war began. Russia itself has a similar problem with so-called social orphans as a heart-wrenching 2013 BBC report showed. According to a U.S.-based Christian charity, there are an estimated 47,000 orphans in Russia.

It is absolutely clear that orphans have been moved to Russia, but the issue of parental consent is a grey area, in circumstances where the location of parents is often unknown. Around 4500 Ukrainian orphans were also moved to Europe, with 2100 living in Poland. Orphans have been relocated to other countries on a temporary basis including Israel and Scotland. Indeed, as the Ukrainian government has pressed for all children to be returned, foster families in Italy and Spain have raised legal disputes seeking to prevent the return of children in their care to a war zone.

Likewise, Ukrainian children have undoubtedly been given Russian citizenship, as investigations by the Financial Times and New York Times have uncovered. Without going into details, I have strong reason to believe that close Russian friends of mine adopted a child from Ukraine in 2022, not long after the war started. They now consider themselves to be the adoptive parents of the child and are raising them with the level of loving care that with my wife, I bestow on my own kids. I don’t condone adoption taking place in this way and my Russian friends present me with a troubling moral dilemma, given the circumstances that led to them taking the child in. But while I pray for them, I find it harder to judge.

For any child, in any country, life in an orphanage will never be as enriching as the loving care of parents. There is some misinformation in the reporting of the challenge of displaced children. Yale School of Medicine has reported on the ‘kidnapping and re-education of Ukraine’s children, talking of ‘fracturing their connection to Ukrainian language… and disconnecting children from their Ukrainian identities.’ However, the vast majority of children displaced from the war torn parts of Ukraine (rather than its major cities like Kiev) would have been Russian speaking, not Ukrainian speaking, and these claims appear deliberately misleading.

Ukraine undoubtedly wants to paint Russia in the image of the villainous child snatcher, in part to bolster its support from western allies and to press the case that Russia is guilty of war crimes. Yet I worry that the issue of forced deportations of children from Ukraine since the war started has become overly politicised. The reality appears much more complex and nuanced, evading easy generalisation. During my diplomatic posting to Russia, my most striking observation was of how loving Russian people are towards children, including my own.

Every child, first and foremost, should be with their parents, assuming they are able to care for them responsibly. In a country that has lost hundreds of thousands of young people to death or injury in the war, the status and protection of children in Ukraine is a totemic issue for entirely understandable reasons. Under the stewardship of Ukraine’s First Lady, there has been a campaign for Ukrainian families to adopt orphans, which led to a record figure of 1264 adoption in 2024, for example.

The problem of socially orphaned children remains deep seated and, long term, it will take real economic progress, coupled perhaps with benevolent social policy, to tackle the root causes. That process can only kick into gear when the guns fall silent allowing Ukraine to start the long delayed reconstruction and regeneration of its economy.

Amidst surprise that Ukraine has sought the return of a relatively small number of children, the conclusion I draw from Istanbul is that the list of 339 is comprised of those for whom there is at least one identified parent in Ukraine who seeks their return. And if that be so, then every effort should be made to facilitate their reunion. While the issue of displaced children didn’t grab the main headlines from the Istanbul talks, progress on bringing these children home may represent an important confidence building measure as both Ukraine and Russia take small, faltering steps towards eventual peace.

Paula Day, Center for Citizen Initiatives, 7/3/25

A simultaneous event happened in Kingston, New York, and St. Petersburg, Russia on June 18, that must encourage all who favor peace between our countries:  a new Spacebridge was thrown out to two audiences of ‘ordinary’ citizens.  The purpose was to provide a live forum for Russians and Americans to speak to each other, face-to-face, to introduce themselves to one another, to ask questions, express concerns and otherwise engage in the halting, sometimes awkward business of getting to know one another.

This Citizens’ Summit was for the people – not academics nor professional analysts, not opinion promoters nor influencers or leaders, but members of the class of human beings who make up 99.9999% (rough guess) of our species who populate this planet.  I would suggest that they are the people CCI refers to as citizen diplomats and I am happy to report that there were three CCI travelers in attendance (including yours truly) and financial support from a fourth as a show of solidarity.

The original Spacebridges took place in the 1980’s, as some of you may remember, and there were clips from the 1985 program hosted by Vladimir Pozner and the late Phil Donohue inserted throughout this year’s event.  (A full video of the ‘80’s landmark is included in the link below.)  This year’s version was not a polished network production, and the hosts were not news media celebrities.  The New York host was Scott Ritter, United States Marine, weapons’ inspector, military analyst, while his counterpart in St. Petersburg was businessman Pavel Balobanov.  The audiences consisted of +/- 30 people in each location.

Asked after the event what I thought were the significant take aways, I came up with two:

1.  Most significant – IT HAPPENED.  Scott and Pavel took the first step in recreating a format that originated in a period when US/USSR relations were at an all-time low and the fear of a nuclear war between the two nuclear superpowers at an all-time high.  Forty years later, both according to the experts and to what our eyes and senses tell us as we view the daily news, the real danger of nuclear war is higher than ever in history.  Fear of that pending catastrophe affected the participants in both audiences but so did a palpable feeling of relief at being able to share that fear.
    
2. Next most significant – THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW IT HAPPENED.  A week before the event we posted to our listserv a video of an interview with Ritter and Balobanov in which they discussed the upcoming Spacebridge.  Some of our readers were able to view it but a few days before the event, Youtube censored and removed it on the pretext that it “violated community standards.” We then heard from other readers, including friends in Russia, that they were unable to view it.  Likewise, we have learned that the Youtube video of the June 18 event has been removed for the same “violation of community standards.”  Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News, attended the event and stood up to express his most concerning fear in today’s world – censorship.  It is well to note that the threat of nuclear war is just that, a threat.  Censorship is real, it is happening to us, and it affects our ability to understand and function rationally in the world around us and that includes our ability to fight the threat of nuclear war.

It is every encouraging to be able to report that the censors are not winning, not yet, anyway.   Scott and Pavel are planning more such citizen-to-citizen meet-ups, Vladimir Pozner hopes to celebrate the December 15 date of the original Spacebridge with another similar production, plans are being discussed for student-to-student bridges in colleges, universities and even elementary schools.  A former CCI traveler hopes to have one such grade school Spacebridge ready this fall. 

Since the subject of ‘fear’ was a clearly animating motivation for the Spacebridges, of 1985 as well as 2015, we might as well face it squarely; in all of nature, fear is critically necessary for life.  When confronted by deadly danger fear motivates and when frightened we humans are motivated to save ourselves by either fleeing or fighting.  If our fear is of nuclear destruction, then we must acknowledge there is nowhere to flee to – fight is our only option. 

And if our fear is of censorship, of losing our right to speak, to assemble and to share our thoughts with others, then what do we do?  I would suggest that we take a good look at the so-called ‘community’ Youtube wants us to be a part of and shun it. And then we should speak louder and more often as we get together and share those words with others.  Nuclear war is neither acceptable nor inevitable, not if enough ‘ordinary’ people in our world say it isn’t. 

With lawlessness, mayhem, bombing, murder, genocide and every other previously ‘unimaginable’ atrocity under the sun seemingly becoming the expected order of the day, you may be left feeling just a little bit helpless or depressed – I know I do.  This state can lead to paralysis, another symptom of fear, which really is deadly.  Fortunately, there are wise people among us to throw out a lifeline when needed and I wish I knew the name of the person who said, “The antidote to hopelessness is not hope.  It’s a plan.” 

The engineers of Spacebridges have a plan.  Hats off to them and let us join them. 

YouTube link here.