As U.S.-Russia tensions mount over Ukraine and the Crimea, it's important to realize that these tensions largely result from the media spin on real and imagined conflicts among the Ukrainian people. The advantage of the Western media over Russian President Vladimir Putin is huge, because Putin’s influence is confined mostly to within the borders of Russia.

The first and most important spin put on the situation was to portray the situation in Ukraine as a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, not among culturally, ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse people in Ukraine, as Ambassador Jack Matlock has convincingly argued.

For several weeks I watched on a wide range of TV channels – from Russian channels to EuroNews - how an originally peaceful protest in the Maidan in Kiev gradually turned more and more violent when as rocks and Molotov cocktails were thrown at unarmed and constantly retreating police. 

The more concessions Viktor Yanukovich made, including the suggestion to have Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister, the more violent the Maidan became.

Finally, right after the compromise accord between the Maidan coalition and Yanukovich was signed – in the presence of Foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland and Russia's human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin – the violence did not abate, as one would have expected, instead the situation got worse. 

Yanukovich accepted virtually all the demands of the Maidan, including a return to the 2004 Constitution and the calling of presidential elections before his term expired. The protestors in the Maidan had every reason to celebrate, instead the area became very violent and dozens were killed.

This turn of events was very difficult to understand, until the conversation between the EU Foreign Affairs High Representative Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet surfaced.

The conversation cited opposition figure Olga Bogomolets saying that the leaders of the Maidan were not interested in discovering the source of the snipers shooting in the Maidan because the violence helped the opposition movement.

Thus the opposition, instead of trying to unify this nation already divided by ethnic and religious loyalties, drove a wedge between western Ukraine, which is mostly Catholic or Eastern Catholic and southern and eastern Ukraine, which is mostly Orthodox.

Some of these Ukrainians in the south and east are ethnic Russians, but most of them identify as Ukrainians who regard Russian as their native language.

This division was felt most painfully by the Russian ethnic majority in the Crimea. Because they were afraid for their autonomous status under a new government headed by Maidan leaders, they made the decision to hold a referendum that could give the region a chance to retain its autonomy as part of Russia.

Had the opposition honored the Feb. 21 agreement and retained Yanukovich as president until the May 25 special election, the Crimea would not have revolted. The grab for power in Kiev triggered regional efforts to secure the safety and well-being of their electorate.

If outside powers, including the United States, the EU, Russia, other members of the CIS or the United Nations have a role to play, it must be as a mediator and peace-maker between these divided segments of the Ukrainian nation.

These outside forces should show the same tactfulness, sensitivity, common sense, persistence and patience that they have shown in respect to Northern Ireland, Quebec, the Basque people and Scotland. So far, it looks as if the Western supporters of Ukraine are applying a double standard.
W. George Krasnow is a former head of the Russian program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California. Now based in Washington, he runs the Russian-American Goodwill Association promoting better relations between the two countries.

Vladislav Krasnov, Ph.D., former professor and head of Russian Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, now lives in Washington where he runs Russia & America Goodwil lAssociation (RAGA).

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Russia’s granting asylum to Edward Snowden is not just a milestone in US-Russia relations. It is a mene tekel of “How the United States is Repeating the Mistakes that Destroyed the Soviet Union”.

This was the topic that Russia Experts Panel discussed at its inception a year ago. The Panel members refuse to yield to the anti-Russian bias of US mass media as they offer dissident views of Russia and world affairs.

The Panel was created by Edward Lozansky, a former Soviet nuclear scientist and dissident who broke with the USSR by applying for an Israeli visa and then settling in the USA with his family in spite of Soviet threats.

Lozansky, who now lives in Washington, in a recent article in The Washington Times, deplores President Obama’s refusal to meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. About US accusations against Snowden, Lozansky says: “Forty years ago, Soviet authorities brought the same accusation against the “gulag whistleblower” Alexander Solzhenitsyn“.

“Will there be a time… when the White House and Congress will forgive (Edward) Snowden …and change their attitude toward him (as) the Russian authorities changed their attitude toward Solzhenitsyn?” asks Lozansky.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was the Nobel Prize winning Russian novelist expelled from the USSR for describing it the way it was. While professing its love for “peaceful co-existence” with the USA and other “capitalist” countries, Soviet government did everything to undermine them. At home it refused to co-exist even with its own dissenting citizens. Now the US government, in its drive to impose “democracy” and “free-market” on the rest of the world through a global “war on terror” does the same with its domestic dissident journalists, like Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, as well as the whistleblowers.

As a former Soviet defector and the author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List, I wanted my native Russia, as well as my adoptive country, prosper in liberty and peace. It is therefore both ironic and unfortunate that after the collapse of the USSR, the USA yielded to hubris of triumphalism and set itself on a course similar to that of the USSR and contrary to the precepts of US Constitution.

Snowden is not a Solzhenitsyn. But he is a man of conscience. His concern for the spiritual and political health of his country drove him to do what he did. No wonder, many Americans admire him as a hero.

My research on Soviet defectors has shown that overwhelming majority abandoned their country, at a huge personal risk and for uncertain future, as a matter of conscience. They did not want bend their conscience to the All-Mighty State and its Global Communism Ambition.

Among the hundreds assembled in my book, several Soviet defectors testified that, in making their fatal decision, whether involving military intelligence or not, they were guided by conscience. In fact, one of them, Nikolai Khokhlov (1922-2007), wrote a book titled In the Name of Conscience.
A trained NKVD officer, Khokhlov proved his bravery and patriotism in a guerrilla team assassination of a Nazi governor of Belarus in 1943. But in 1954 he refused to obey the order to assassinate an expatriate Russian in Berlin. He knew his refusal could be fatal, and defected to become US citizen and psychology professor. After the fall of the USSR, Khokhlov was pardoned and allowed to return to Russia.

Soviet government’s failure to accommodate different persuasions inside the USSR resulted in a hemorrhage of talented and patriotic Russians. Some of them, most notably Solzhenitsyn whose books were best-sellers in the West, greatly contributed to the defense of the United States and preservation of peace and freedom in the world.

In 2010 Jack Matlock, the distinguished former US ambassador to the USSR, published Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray–And How to Return to Reality. He argued after the collapse of the USSR, US leaders came to believe that they did not need international organizations and diplomacy, but could dominate and the world by using its military power.

Lately, former President Jimmy Cater went on record as saying that the USA “no longer has a functioning democracy”.  “At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Carter wrote. “But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.”

Ray McGovern, a long time CIA officer who used to present intelligence briefings for US presidents, in an article entitled The Moral Imperative of Activism admonished the nation to pay more attention to its prophets, not just profits. He strongly endorsed social activism in these words: “No one has put it better than a precious new friend I met on a “cruise” in June/July 2011 hoping to reach Gaza – author and poet Alice Walker – who said: “Activism is my rent for living on this planet.”

Had US leaders, both in the government and media, honestly reflected on such pronouncements by seasoned diplomats, politicians and patriotic citizens, they would have been less rush in condemning the likes of Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning or Julian Assange.
An earnest effort at soul-searching is a must for this nation. A country that fails to integrate citizens of different ideological persuasions is bound to disintegrate.

Vladislav Krasnov, Ph.D., former professor and head of Russian Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, now lives in Washington where he runs Russia & America Goodwil lAssociation (RAGA).

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Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association! Please be patient while the RAGA site is being rebuilt. 

I came from Washington to Moscow just on time for a festive Easter (Paskha) celebration table hosted by my good Russian friend who is a fine poetess and folklore collector. The guests included an Australian philosopher and China-enthusiast, his Russian interpreter and a Russian anthropologist visiting Moscow from Lisbon where she is married to a Portuguese. 

We all got together thanks to English Language Evenings (www.elemoscow.net) that the American Stephen Lapeyrouse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Lapeyrouse) has been running at the Chekhov Center for fifteen years. As this year the Russian Resurrection Day fell on the same day and the Catholic and Anglican Easter, we were happy to share the Russian Paskha (a ritual cheese-cake with raisins) and the lavish Kulitch bakery.

In addition to Easter, we celebrated the memory of Alexander Vashchenko, an University of Moscow professor and specialist on American Indians who passed away. He had translated a number of American Indian folklore collections into Russian, and his book about native Siberian peoples was recently published in the USA: The Way of Kinship: An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature (please find it on Amazon).

On the topic of Ukraine, we wondered how the situation there has been misread, misunderstood and officially lied about in mass media propaganda from Washington to Lisbon to Sidney.

"As the Ukraine situation has worsened," writes my colleague Sharon Tennison, the founder of the Center of Citizen Initiatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Citizen_Initiatives) in San Francisco, "unconscionable misinformation and hype is being poured on Russia and Vladimir Putin..Journalists and pundits must scour the Internet and thesauruses to come up with fiendish new epithets to describe both."

Sharon has been running for years the pioneering alternative website Russia: Other Points of View - ROPV (www.russiaotherpointsofview.com). Her 2012 book, The Power of Impossible Ideas: Ordinary Citizens' Extraordinary Efforts to Avert International Crises (please find it on Amazon) shows that she never left lies about Russia unchallenged. Now in an April 21, 2014 article Russia Report: Putin she spells out how the demonization of both Russia and Putin has grown in vitriol and intensity. 

"I don't pretend to be an expert, just a program developer in the USSR and Russia for the past 30 years.  But during this time, I've have had far more direct, on-ground contact with Russians of all stripes across 11 time zones than any of the Western reporters or for that matter any of Washington's officials.  I've been in country long enough to ponder Russian history and culture deeply, to study their psychology and conditioning, and to understand the marked differences between American and Russian mentalities which so complicate our political relations with their leaders... Washington has been notoriously disinterested in understanding these differences and attempting to meet Russia halfway".

Sharon's conclusion:

Putin "should get high marks for his performance over the past 14 years.  It's not by accident that Forbes declared him the most Powerful Leader of 2013, replacing Obama who was given the title for 2012."

Read about Sharon's personal encounters with Putin on: www.russiaotherpointsofview.com

Putin's latest April 17 "hot-line" encounter with the Russian people and scores of Russian and foreign journalists was largely ignored by Western media, so here is the transcript in English (eng.kremlin.ru/news/7034).

One highlight was when Putin politely rebuked a well-known Russian fantasy writer Sergei Lukyanenko (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Lukyanenko), of Ukrainian origin, for suggesting that Ukraine is an accursed nation. President asked the writer not to use such damning expressions and instead called Ukraine a "long-suffering" nation. Since this epithet is commonly used to describe Russia, President clearly appealed to the Russians not to condemn or hate Ukrainians but empathize with them. Putin even showed if not a sympathy than a psychological insight into the difficult plight of West-Ukrainian ultra-nationalists whose "territories were part of Czechoslovakia, some of Hungary, some of Austro-Hungary and some of Poland, where they were never full-fledged citizens." 

Putin identified the major cause of Russia's and Ukraine's "long-suffering": during WWI the Russians allowed the Bolsheviks to drive a wedge of class-struggle hatred that divided the nation and lead Russia to a resounding defeat and a loss of huge territories even while its Western allies triumphed and enjoyed all the spoils of victory.

Although Putin did not say so, one can well conclude that after the downfall of the USSR the spirit of devisiveness has prevailed among all former Soviet peoples, including the Russians and Ukrainians, when the "democrats" fought against the "patriots" and one ethnic group against another while the country was being robbed by the oligarchs to the detriment of all. I have already referred to Janine Wedel's bookCollision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (please find it on Amazon) in which she describes Western advisers' role in "reforms".

Clearly, to understand the plight of Ukraine now we have to take into account not only the internal ethnic, religious and cultural divisions among Western and Eastern Ukrainians but also the role of Ukrainian oligarchs in political shenanigans now playing out in Kiev and Eastern Ukraine.

The deputy to Igor Kolomoysky, the new Dnepropetrovsk governor (among several oligarchs appointed by the Maidan junta), offered  to pay 10 thousand US dollars to anyone who captures or kills  a «green man» (supposedly a Russian soldier, but in fact any of the thousands of protesters in East Ukraine). Source: news.pn/en/public/101944

Edward Snowden, the American defector who has found a refuge in Russia, asked via a videotape, whether Russia does a masssurveillance and date storing of all mobile and email communications in Russia. Putin replied that Russian "laws...strictly regulate the use of special equipment by security services, including the tapping of private conversations and the surveillance of online communications. They need to receive a court warrant to be able to use this equipment in each particular case. So there is no... indiscriminate mass surveillance under Russian law."

As the author of the book Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List, I already wrote about Snowden's dilemma (http://www.eurasiareview.com/15082013-to-defect-or-to-integrate-edward-snowdens-dilemma-oped/) I regard his defection a very significant marker of what my colleague Martin Sieff calls a Reversal of Fortune (http://us-russia.org/95-reversal-of-fortune-how-the-united-states-is-repeating-the-mistakes-that-destroyed-the-soviet-union-by-martin-sieff.html): today the USA increasingly assumes the role of the USSR as the global driver toward a totalitarian utopia, except Soviet ideology envisioned a world revolution and nationalization of all privateproperty whereas the US tries to impose on the rest of the world the ideology of "indisputable benefits of free market, privatization and democracy". 


The word "defector" here is indicative of the inherent defect in a system that allows a government to arrogate totalitarian powers. While numerous Soviet defections resulted in a collapse of the system, I remain hopeful that the US will find the wisdom to reverse the trend toward totalitarian controls, integrate dissent inside the country and, above all, renounce its globalist ideological mission and return to fending its national interests rather than serving few tycoons who may indeed benefit from privatizations overseas.

That's how Jean-Claude Meslin, a French observer, sums up Putin's performance in an April 18 message: 

"I watched most of the Q&R session and found Mister Putin excellent. None of the actual Western leaders can be compared to this gentleman. Our French "Goujat" is so ridiculous; Cameron, Merkel not much better. Uncle-Tom Obama, no need to mention him. I think that it will please a lot of people, in Europe, as in America if the President of the Russian Federation will do a Q&R session with the wholeWorld... We all humans go through a very difficult period and we just simply cannot keep on going like this much longer (Some idiots for economic purposes push toward military confrontations)...." Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_04_17/photo-Vladimir-Putin-s-hot-line-3031/

Gordon Duff, former US security officer, says that since US government does not know what is going on in Ukraine, its line of command is divided. Writing for the Veterans Today, he says:

"Will the Obama administration, while it still has time, admit it is repeating its horrific errors in Syria?  Imagine a four year civil war in the Ukraine.  Syria will seem like a summer vacation. The people of Ukraine do not deserve this..." Source: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/04/21/us-caught-in-web-of-lies/

On the Left, Peter Hitchens writes in The Daily Mail:
"We unleashed armed mobs  in Kiev, to overthrow the lawful authority. They have done the same in Donetsk....
For greater credibility, Hitchens explains:  "I write as a former Marxist revolutionary who has organized demonstrations and knows how hard it is to mobilise and sustain them." Concludes Hitchens: "I have no doubt that the ‘Maidan’ protests in Kiev had what I shall politely call help from outside". Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2608679/PETER-HITCHENS-Who-using-spies-lies-grab-power-Kiev-We-are.html#ixzz2znvhpXey 

Martin Sieff writes about historical significance of the so called annexation of the Crimea: "For the first time in more than a quarter century — indeed, since the Soviet Red Army’s evacuation of Afghanistan in 1987 — a long tide of Russian retreat, shrinkage and national disintegration has been reversed....When viewed from the Russian perspective, the toppling of President Yanukovych was thus not an isolated incident. To them, it was just the latest and most outrageous step in a systematic U.S.-led policy of incursions into the heart of Russia’s historic core security zone".  Read more: Russia: Pushing Back at the United States - The Globalist // http://www.theglobalist.com/russia-pushing-back-united-states/

On the Right, Patrick Buchanan in an April 18, 2014 asserts article "NED’s chickens come home to roost" accuses the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of standing behind a number of color revolutions aimed at "change of regime".

"If, after all, it was a triumph of self-determination for Ukraine to secede from the Russian Federation, do not Russians in Crimea and Donetsk have the same right — to secede from Kiev and go home to Russia?" Source: http://www.humanevents.com/2014/04/18/neds-chickens-come-home-to-roost/

Buchanan's previous article "Is Putin one of us?" (http://buchanan.org/blog/putin-one-us-6071) was so significant that I translated it for the Russian site - geopolitika.rf 

Buchanan's asserts that, far from being a holdover of the Evil Communist Empire as it is often maligned by US mass media, Putin's Russia may yet prove to be a staunch defender of the basic values of Western civilization, such as the family, religious faith and human dignity, the values that are often downplayed or distorted by the "politically correct" advocates of "free market and democracy" who are never shy of "regime change" in foreign lands by massive propaganda and, if necessary, by the terror of drones and carpet bombing.

Having started with the way Easter is celebrated now in Russia, one wonders about the USA? 

"Advertisers now call an Easter ham a "holiday ham". You know, so as not to offend all those celebrating Passover with a ham", so writes Eugene Girin in the conservative "Chronicles of Culture" (https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/holiday-ham-and-easter-bunnies). Deploring the "unilateral disarmament of the American Christians and their church leaders - all in the name of the false gods of ecumenism, political correctness, and tolerance," the author unwittingly supports Buchanan's thesis about the decline of traditional, Christian values in the US. A former Soviet Jew now residing in the USA, Girin concludes that "only by strongly reasserting their Faith, without any apology or fear in the face of the cunning yet cowardly enemies, can American Christians protect their faith and their country. Happy Easter!"

Having seen on Russian TV that President Putin got an Easter egg from the Patriarch of Russia, I wonder now whether President Obama got a Holiday egg or any egg at all?

Finally, Patrick Armstrongthe, former Canadian diplomat,  did his best to accumulate, digest and summarize the latest on Ukraine:

We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs.

RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world.

In the turbulent years since the fall of Communism, Russia underwent a huge experiment in ideological, political and economic transformation. Some of the reforms have already yielded positive results (individual liberty, access to information, freedom to travel); others have been followed by increased corruption, social disparity, destruction of social safety net, and demographic decline; others reforms are not yet complete. Given its natural resources and talents of its people, we believe Russia will succeed beyond expectations.

We welcome your articles, letters, and suggestions as to how best improve U.S. - Russia relations.

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