​On June 16, the New York Times reported :

“More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”

We are a group of concerned U.S. citizens currently visiting Russia with the goal of increasing understanding and reducing international tension and conflict. We are appalled by this call for direct U.S. aggression against Syria, and believe it points to the urgent need for open public debate on U.S. foreign policy.

Center for Citizen Initiatives - Vision and Mission: Massive nuclear arsenals are once again on high alert in the United States and Russia. Misunderstandings, fallacious accusations, flare ups and demonizing propaganda have covered print media and television screens for two years. At CCI, we see the need and possibility for changing this situation. When real people in large numbers get involved, amazing things begin to happen. Join us! Let's help reduce the tensions existing today between the two Superpowers.

Continue reading at: http://ccisf.org

​
Bridging Divides of a New Cold War
By Ann Wright - June 15, 2016

As NATO steps up military maneuvers near Russia’s borders and congressmen fume about “Russian aggression,” a delegation of Americans including former U.S. officials is looking for face-to-face ways to encourage peace, writes Ann Wright.

I just flew across 11 times zones — from Tokyo, Japan to Moscow, Russia. Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth’s inhabited land area, nearly twice as large as the United States and has extensive mineral and energy resources, the largest reserves in the world. Russia has the world’s ninth largest population with over 146.6 million people. The population of the U.S of 321.4 million is more than twice as large as Russia’s.

I haven’t been back to Russia since the early 1990s when the Soviet Union dissolved itself and allowed 14 new countries to be created from it. At the time I was a U.S. diplomat and wanted to be a part of the historic opening of U.S. Embassies in one of the newly formed countries. I asked to be sent to a new country in Central Asia and soon found myself in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Continue reading at: http://ccisf.org

All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org

This true story of a Ukrainian Professor Mikhail Tamoikin may sound like a script from a Hollywood action blockbuster, however all of this happened to him for real just last summer. After surviving this horrific ordeal, Prof. Tamoikin agreed to share his thoughts about those life and death events with the English audience.
 
Last August Mikhail Tamoikin was kidnapped at gunpoint in the center of Kiev, chained and dragged into a car, taken to a boat, where he was beaten and tortured. Miraculously he managed to escape by jumping into the river and swimming for 12 km to safety. After calling the local police, Mikhail quickly learned that the corrupt Ukrainian government officials and “on the take” law enforcement officers were responsible for his kidnapping. Prof. Tamoikin managed to barely get out of Ukraine, moving to Lithuania, but that did not stop this international criminal candidate. Just two months later a second attempt on his life took place. An unmarked car with a masked driver intentionally hit Mikhail in Vilnius city, and when he survived that, these criminals, dressed as policemen, tried to finish the job.
 
So what did Prof. Tamoikin do to have the most dangerous Eastern European Mafia with deep government ties after him? He single-handedly stopped perhaps the largest illegal sale of ancient gold artefacts in the world, worth over half a Billion dollars. It was organized by corrupt high-ranking Ukrainian officials, police officers and organized crimes groups, who are still after Mikhail to this day. 

Mikhail Tamoikin is a Professor with university degrees in oceanography, law, finance and art. In 1988-1994 he worked for UNESCO in West Africa, however after the collapse of the USSR he moved to Canada and started to work in the art sector. By 2001, Mikhail developed a number of scientific innovations to regulate the chaotic art and antiquity market. He began to implement his technologies in Ukraine, a nation that was extremely rich in such cultural valuables but poor in knowledge of how to properly manage them.
 
It was then, when Tamoikin Expert System (TES), developed by Prof. Tamoikin, started to receive worldwide attention due to its success. At that time TES represented only several “world’s first” technologies such as – mathematical and fully transparent appraisal system that can evaluate any art, antique or collectible item; art identity management methodology; complete item information document and a number of other innovations. Today TES consists of 17 unique technologies, systems and methods which allows the user to do the unthinkable – stabilize, effectively manage and intelligently regulate any national, as well as international [multibillion dollar] art markets. To date it is considered as the last completely unregulated market on earth.
 
Not even the larger auction houses, biggest galleries, major art institutions or even ministries of culture and finance have anything remotely close to TES technologies, developed by Professor Tamoikin. Naturally brining light, rules and transparency to the shadow art world, where up to 1.5 trillion dollars circulate annually, is a messy affair. Mikhail learned it the hard way.  
 
In 2010 professor Tamoikin becomes the director of the Science Institute of Standardization and Attestation, which was part of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. In 2012 the Chief of Internal Affairs, one of the highest ranking police officers in Ukraine, tasked Prof. Tamoikin to do an unprecedented and very dangerous job in a very short amount of time. A job that other government departments declined to do.  

Mikhail and his science team had to research, catalogue and evaluate over 2500 gold artefacts, that were confiscated by the police from corrupt gov’t officials, in the high profile criminal case №18-458/1.
 
Several of the arrested [with these treasures] were close bodyguards of former president of Ukraine - Viktor Yushchenko. Needles to say these people were extremely dangerous and were accused of very serious crimes such as murder and torture.
 
This highly sensitive matter demanded a lot effort, if it was to be completed in the limited timeframe that was given. Prof. Tamoikin and his team of 11 people worked non-stop under highest levels of security. They had to bring in experts from all parts of Ukraine and even the EU, something that had to be confirmed in writing by the Chief of Internal Affairs. All work was classified as top secret and took place in the vaults of the National Bank of Ukraine, under constant guard and supervision by the Secret Police, know as SBU. In the end, Tamoikin’s team got the job done on time, however instead of awards and acceptance of System TES (which made it all possible) as the national standard, everyone was issued regular letters of gratitude and quickly forgotten. 

Near the end of 2012, due to poor governance by President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukrainian people start an apprising to oust the corrupt government elite that mismanaged the country. In 2014, when it has grown into a full scale revolution against corruption, Prof. Tamoikin chooses to take part in those events, as he himself saw and fought such corruption on daily basis. 

2014 Shout Out UK interview with Prof. Tamoikin when he was on Maidan:
http://www.shoutoutuk.org/2014/01/24/ukraine-the-revolution-grows-where-will-it-all-end/

For that participation he was instantly prosecuted, harassed and threatened by evermore violent Yanukovych regime. In fear for the safety of his family, Mikhail was forced to move to his second residence in Lithuania. From there he watched as the entire Maidan Revolution was hijacked by even more corrupt individuals, like current oligarch and President of Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko, along with his ministers. 
 
Seeing that nothing has changed for the better, and the Poroshenko regime was much worse than Yanukovych’s, especially in light of the fact that many people who rose up against corruption were prosecuted even more severely, Mikhail Tamoikin realized he could not return to Ukraine. He started to openly criticize the new Kiev government for stealing the national wealth of Ukraine, jailing the regulators and reporters who dared to publicly confront them, while blaming all country’s troubles on the annexation of Crimea.
 
On several occasion Prof. Tamoikin appeared on National TV in Lithuania and have openly talked about the crimes that these new Ukrainian leaders were committing. For that he was repeatedly warned and then threatened by Ukrainian government officials, which included high ranking police chiefs.  This also put him on the radar of criminal organizations that were working closely with the corrupt politicians.
 
In February of 2014, Mikhail received an offer to purchase an antique gold helmet, from one of his friend in Austria. Much to his surprise, this was the same helmet that was part of that half a billion dollar archaeology collection Prof. Tamoikin and his team documented, evaluated and appraised for the Ukrainian Police in the criminal case 18-458/1. He knew this artefact of national importance was the property of Ukraine and could not possibly be exported or sold. It belonged in a national museum, but never the less the offer was real and this gold helmet was already somehow smuggled to central Europe. Furthermore the helmet had fully documented history and provenance [obviously faked] stating that it belonged to a prominent Jewish family for decades, but now they wanted to sell it. The asking price was 30,000,000 EUR, which is the only truthful statement in those documents, as it was copied from original TES appraisal documents that Prof. Tamoikin did himself in 2012.   

When Mikhail showed his Austrian colleague the original documents from the criminal case, proving the helmet was stolen, the man was shocked by the power and influence of the criminals involved. Prof. Tamoikin then proceeded to take actions to stop the sale of that $30 million helmet and other multimillion dollar artefacts that these criminals stole from Ukraine.
 
He soon learned that all 2500 gold artefacts were missing from the National Bank of Ukraine, so were all the documents from the criminal case 18-458/1 that Tamoikin’s team worked so hard on. As Mikhail learned later, his reports were destroyed soon after the Maidan Revolution was over, by someone in the police. That is not easy as it may sound, since those documents were represented by 24 volumes consisting of close to 11,000 pages. Without any doubt this was an inside job ordered by corrupt government officials. No paperwork meant that these extremely valuable gold rarities of national importance now belonged to no one and could permanently disappear from Ukraine. That’s exactly what happened, they were stolen without anyone knowing of their existence, then smuggled into central Europe in order to be sold there. Someone was supposed to get very rich.
 
What these criminals did not know was that Prof. Tamoikin kept official copies of all documents on that collection which had original signatures of top officers from Ministry of Internal Affairs. Furthermore he received permission from the police [at that time] to take them out of the country, which Mikhail did. That meant that he had the only copies that could prove this half a billion dollar gold collection belonged to the people of Ukraine. Furthermore it proved that these artefacts were stolen and smuggled into the EU. Precisely these vital reports Prof. Tamoikin actively used to stop each and every illegal attempt to sell those multimillion dollar artefacts. He sent the documents to law enforcement agencies, shared them with reporters and distributed copies to known art dealers – thus blocking those unlawful sales of stolen Ukrainian culture.
 
Tamoikin Art Fund’s July 3, 2015 Shout Out UK report where this criminal case 18-458/1 and the $30 million dollar gold helmet are published. One month later Mikhail Tamoikin was kidnapped: http://www.shoutoutuk.org/2015/07/03/the-shocking-counter-terrorism-report/
 
When powerful corrupt government officials and organized crime groups with deep international reach saw their transactions fall apart, all because of one man – they went after Mikhail. As long as those documents existed they could not sell that collection. As many of you can imagine half a billion dollars is not a small chunk of change. People get killed for far less. However killing Prof. Tamoikin would not solve their problem – they needed to get their hands on the documents, and destroy them.
 
For that reason on August 10, 2015 Professor Mikhail Tamoikin was tracked [with sophisticated technology available only to law enforcement], followed and professionally kidnapped in brought daylight at gunpoint in the center of Kiev, capital of Ukraine.
 
Here is what happened in Mikhail’s own words: 
 
“On August 10, 2015 I was kidnapped and taken hostage by fully masked and armed gunmen, who had guns with silencers, in the Kiev city, capital of Ukraine. They first sprayed something in my face that made me dizzy, soon after I lost consciousness. I woke up from severe pain in the trunk of a car, fully tied and covered with a blanket on top of which someone was sitting to keep me down. I lost consciousness again and came to [due to beatings] on a large river boat. There I was beaten and tortured for several hours. I was tied up and blindfolded most of the time. A metal chain was placed on my neck, but it wasn’t tied to anything, and was used to pull and choke me.
 
Later that night, when my kidnappers left me alone, I was able to chew through the ropes and get free. The armed guards that beat me always came in pairs in one hour internal. This disciplined rotation reaffirmed my suspicion that they could be the police or the military. I hoped that if I were to make noise in between their scheduled checkups and beatings, only one guard would show up to check on me. So I did and by pure luck that is exactly what happened.
 
The light was off where I was, so I hid and got ready to jump on my kidnapper, using the element of surprise. When the guard came in I hit him several time, then ran past and jumped into the river Dnepr. Then I dove under the boat and swam underwater as far as I could into the middle of the river, almost loosing consciousness.
 
My attackers came after me, however because we were closer to the shore, they thought I would swim there, so the attention and the spotlights were focused away from me in the beginning, giving me time to make my escape. Another boat lit up in the dark and aided them in the search for me. Then they started patrolling the entire river. By pure luck I was able to evade them and escape, by swimming underwater most of the first hour. I would come up for air, take a few deep breaths and go under again, staying down as long as I could. Every time I came up to breath, I thought someone would see me and shoot me in the head, they all had guns with silencers after all. Miraculously that did not happen and after that first hour I swam and drifted quite far from the area where those boats were. I spent several hours in the river and was close to hypothermia even though it was summer. Nevertheless, I let the current take me as far away down the river, as I was able to bear. I feared that they would easily catch me with fast motorboats. By morning I no longer was able to stay in the water, so I swam to the shore, found people on a small beach near by, and with their help called the police.
 
These people, who saw me coming out of the water, could not believe their eyes. I had a metal chain on my neck. I was wearing only torn shorts. My skin was cut, bruised and injured. And on top of it all, I was so cold and beaten that I could not speak properly at first. 

From the beginning the police investigators intentionally did not do their job, I guess due to orders from above. No witnesses were questioned. No videos were taken from street cameras, which were abundant in that area, and had to record my kidnapping. No inquiries were made about boats and their numbers that were on the river that day. In short, nothing was done. It was clear someone powerful wanted this investigation to go away quietly.

Because I was a member of the International Police Association (www.ipa-iac.org) I had a number of friends in the police and Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Right away they told me that my family and I were in grave danger, suggesting we leave the country immediately. As they explained, there were talks of corrupt high-ranking police officers that were extremely upset that I escaped, and were thinking of taking more drastic actions.

The professional style I was kidnapped, using a knockout spray, well armed gunmen, change of locations, use of cars and boats, being tied-up the way law enforcement would, all reaffirmed that corrupt police or military personnel were behind this. My own friends who served, said this was definitely MO of Ukrainian Secret Police.”  
 
Read article “Kiev allows torture and runs secret jails, says UN”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kiev-allows-torture-and-runs-secret-jails-says-un-vwlcrpsjn
 
After arriving to Lithuania, Prof Mikhail Tamoikin continued to actively promote his system TES, through videos, articles, conferences and other media events. Soon the Ministry of Defence of Lithuania noticed his work and invited Mikhail to be a guest speaker at the International Security Conference, held in Vilnius. There, Prof. Tamoikin once again talked about art smuggling, retelling the story how he stopped the illegal sale of the $30 million gold helmet and half a billion worth of other Ukrainian artefacts. 

​Watch Prof. Tamoikin’s presentation in the Ministry of Defence of Lithuania:

Unfortunately, this public defiance of international organized crime groups put Prof. Tamoikin in serious danger once again. Soon after that presentation a second attempt on his life took place.  
 
Once again, here is what happened in Mikhail’s own words:
 
“On October 21, 2015 I was bicycling to one of our art storage facilities, the location of which was known to only my family member and the police and the land registrar in Lithuania. At the point where the road was more visible to the oncoming traffic than to me, making it an ideal place to stage a collision, a dark car suddenly flew towards me at very high speed with its high beam lights on full. Right away it swerved towards me, with full intent to cause a high speed collision. I only had split seconds to react. Intuitively I twisted the handlebar, directing the bike away from the vehicle, but was unable to fully evade and got hit by the car. Fortunately my evasive actions minimized the impact. I was thrown away from the bicycle, flying several meters in the air before hitting pavement and rolling on the ground. Right before the collision and while in the air, I did see that the dark car was a minivan with no licence plates while the driver was masked by sunglasses and a hat. A metal guardrail stopped my tumble. As I hit it, I seriously injured my head, splitting it wide open. Blood started poring everywhere and I lost consciousness for what must have been a few minutes. 

When I came back, my head was spinning and I was very dizzy. My clothes were all torn and I was clearly in shock. However, what happened next was even more alarming than the injuries sustained from the hit.
 
 Conveniently, within a few minutes a police car arrived. From it, two people dressed as police officers emerged and started walking up to me cautiously. One of them had an upholstered handgun, which looked like a revolver. Not a standard issued firearm in Lithuanian police, to my knowledge. Hit men prefer revolves because they leave no casing when fired. At least that was the thought that flashed in my mid as they approached me. I was getting better but still could not stand up, so I just sat there awaiting my fait. By then, the sun started to set. It was not dark but it wasn’t broad daylight either. The two men talked in Lithuanian with each other and I could not understand them. They were also looking around a lot, somewhat nervously. Then they started to talk to me in Lithuanian, in a somewhat aggressive manner. I could not understand them, and replied in Russian, when that did not work I tried English. Almost all Lithuanians speak Russian, especially the policemen who are also obligated to know basic English. They did not respond in ether language and continued talking in Lithuanian. Then they looked at each other nodding, as if hey agreed to do something, when suddenly an old lady came out of the corner. As soon as they saw her, the two policemen said something to each other, got into a car and hastily left me bloodied and injured where I was.
 
Right that very moment I realized that real officers of the law would not do that. Either they were corrupt cops or criminals dressed as policemen, probably there to finish the job or kidnap me after the failed hit by the minivan. It was not uncommon for criminals to dress as law enforcement in Lithuania. In fact one of my associates, a well know art collector and his family were kidnapped and robbed by such fake policemen a number of years back.
 
Lithuanian art collector’s son kidnapped: http://ru.delfi.lt/news/crime/zaderzhany-podozrevaemye-v-pohischenii-ikon-za-50-mln-litov.d?id=28228119
 
The old lady approached me and naturally started talking in Lithuanian. Apparently she also did not understand Russian, however she did give me a cloth to stop the blood and then helped me get up. I nodded to her that I was alright and she reluctantly left. If it wasn’t for her, chances are I wouldn’t be alive now.
 
 I as stood there thinking about what happened, my first reaction was to call the real police, however my cell phone got broken by the fall and did not work so I decided to slowly make my way back home. It was quite far, however when I realized that my family could also be in danger from these very same people a rush of adrenalin hit me, giving strength and clarity of mind. My bike was broken but surprisingly worked, more or less, so I rolled downhill on it and walked up. After I got home, cleaned myself up and had time to think, I realized that a second attempt on my life in such a short period of time in Lithuania, an EU nation, was only possible if local corrupt officials in government and police were working with or for the same people who kidnapped me in Ukraine.
 
In short, they knew everything about me to the detail and this time organized a well planed operation, involving an entire team of people in police uniforms and cars. It is hard to believe that such an operation was executed without the knowledge of the local police. I think someone was paid off and some were even in on it.
 
Furthermore, taking into account the very close cooperation between the government of Lithuania and the new government of Ukraine, where many Lithuanian citizens were invited to be Ukrainian ministers and high-ranking police commanders - I realized that some of these corrupt individuals could be working together to silence me.
 
Lithuanian citizens are serving as Ukrainian ministers and high-ranking policemen:
http://24tv.ua/golovniy_politseyskiy_vilnyusa_pratsyuvatime_v_ukrayini_n646397
 
There was simply no way that corrupt Ukrainian police and criminals that organized this second attempt on my life would have know the following information about me – without explicit cooperation with the local Lithuanian police:

• They knew that I was living in Lithuania.
• They knew I was in Vilnius city and not anywhere else.
• They knew my home address, which I kept private.
• They knew the address of our secret storage facility, which was known only to my family members, the local police and government land registrar.
• They knew the exact route, out of many, that I would take to get to our secret facility, something that can only be done if they were either following me, or tracking my cell phone. I think it was the latter, as the streets were empty that day and I do not recall many vehicles on the road. It is also how my kidnappers tracked me in Ukraine, as I was told by my contact in the police there.
• They knew I would be on a bicycle and not in a car, so someone was watching my home.
• They knew the ideal place and time to hit me with the car, indicating that another person was directing the driver from higher ground, possibly the same policemen that approached me after I survived the hit.
• They had backup plan involving either actual police officers who were willing to kill me or criminals that dressed as such. Because those policemen arrived in a very real looking police car, I assume they were in fact corrupt but real officers of the law.  

 
Right at that very moment I realized that I had to immediately leave Lithuania and move to a country where my family and I could be safe, where there was no corruption in law enforcement and where I could continue to work on my TES project to fight the criminal rule over the art market.”
 
It is important to add that on November 18, 2015, just one month after Prof. Tamoikin was attacked in Lithuania, his colleague – General Alexander Ruvin, Director of Institute of Criminology of Ukraine was shot at, but luckily survived. Mikhail and Alexander fought against corruption and worked closely together on several high-profile projects including the infamous criminal case 18-458/1. Prof. Tamoikin and his friends in the Ukrainian police believe Mr. Ruvin was targeted by the same people who kidnapped Mikhail. 
 
Shot, Alexander Ruvin - Director of Institute of Criminology of Ukraine:
https://news.pn/en/criminal/148738
 
To this day Prof. Tamoikin is fighting against serious international mafia that is robbing Ukraine and other countries of their national cultural treasures that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the black art market.
 
He is able to do that because of his close fiends in the law enforcement, who not only warned and protected Mikhail after his kidnapping but also help him expose the corrupt officials that steal valuable works of art from their own people. Prof. Tamoikin cannot name most of his confidants, as that would put a lot of them in danger. Nevertheless, one person gave him such permission.
 
Col. Valeriy Stepanovich Kur (ret.) is a legendary figure in the Ukrainian police circles. He worked for a number of law enforcement agencies as well as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was one the original founders of the first police department in Ukraine to fight organized crime. 

Col. Valeriy Stepanovich Kur (ret.)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кур,_Валерий_Степанович
​

Just for helping Prof. Tamoikin, Col. Kur made a lot of his superiors extremely angry but even so he continued to help. Here is an exert from a letter that Mikhail received from the colonel:
 
“As far as my abilities allow, I continue to push the Ministry of Internal Affairs to do the investigation properly, to find the criminals who kidnapped you. I even accused them of purposeful inaction and intentional misconduct. So much so that I’ve already been openly told that I’m the main enemy of the Minister and his entire political team. So far, I encountered nothing but anger from the government bureaucrats and police officers. On the upside, today 3.05.2016 at 14:50 (local time), on TV (ISTV-channel) there’s going to be a small news report, where I will talk about your kidnapping. I am not indifferent to what happened to you, so I’m happy to tell your story. Let me know if you have any new details that I can share publicly.” 
 
From Col. Kur’s own words it becomes clear that the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine is fully informed about the kidnapping of Prof. Mikhail Tamoikin, however this case appears to be purposefully frozen while the colonel is intentionally stonewalled.
 
Because of this, Prof. Tamoikin and his friends in Ukrainian law enforcement circles, did their own private investigation and found out with high degree of certainty that the boat (which turned out to be a yacht) where Mikhail was kept prisoner, belonged to one of the high-ranking politicians. So much so that even past and current President of Ukraine, along with top ministers and oligarchs were known to hold private events on that yacht. This says much about the level and extreme seriousness of the people who ordered Prof. Tamoikin kidnapped and possibly killed. This also explains why his case is standing still and no one, from local police to Internal Affairs are willing to investigate it. It is clear they are ordered not to.
 
In contrast, a very similar kidnapping happened with the citizen of France, in the same city of Kiev, not long ago. Almost instantly the Ukrainian police found and prosecuted the perpetrators. This clearly shows that when the police wishes to solve a case, they do. When it comes to Mikhail, they do not.   
 
French citizen kidnapped in Ukraine:
http://newsoboz.org/proisshestviya/politsiya-zaderzhala-pohititeley-frantsuzskogo-grazhdanina-09052016172019
 
To conclude this incredible story, we asked Prof. Tamoikin to share the findings of an independent investigation done by his police colleagues, into why he was kidnapped and what was the main goal? Here are the top three versions:
 
#1) Prof. Tamoikin was kidnapped to get his (second) copies of all legal documents that represent and identify 2,500 rare gold artefacts confiscated by the Ukrainian police in the high profile case 18-458/1. Once the documents were retrieved from Mikhail, they could be destroyed, and so is the last proof that these rarities were in government’s possession. Then, corrupt politicians, using their power and criminal connections, could smuggle them into the EU and sell on the black art market for close to $500,000,000 US and potentially more.  
 
#2) Mikhail’s kidnappers wanted to extort valuable antiques from his family members. The Tamoikin Art Fund, where Prof. Tamoikin is the Vice President, owns a number of world-class rarities such as:

• 4th c. B.C. Greek-Scythian gold drinking horn - valued at $12 million US.
• 1st c.  B.C. Persian King's gold necklace - valued at $33 million US.
• 16th c. A.D. Rublev Iconostasis - valued at $7.6 million US
• Large ancient book collection worth tens of million.
• Very large antique weapons collection worth millions.

And many other collectibles, totalling more than 76 thousand items. 
 
#3) It is possible that the people who ordered the kidnapping of Prof. Mikhail Tamoikin wanted to destroy his TES project, which is making the multibillion dollar shadow art market very transparent. That means the end of corruption, tax evasion, forgeries, under-the-table deals and all other criminal activities that make a lot of money for organized crime as well as their corrupt government patrons.
 
TES technologies and educational programs are well known around the world by art professionals, collectors, dealers as well as powerful politicians and even criminals. For example in 2006, Marina Poroshenko, the wife of the current President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, graduated from Prof. Tamoikin’s TES program. At the same time, it was widely known that all Ukrainian Presidents including Poroshenko (who is still a big art collector) stubbornly resisted any legislation that would regulate the art market in Ukraine. They liked and defended the status quo, where theft, contraband and corruption were practically made legal. The project TES fought against such unfair market conditions, in so doing making a lot of enemies including heads of state.
 
As Prof. Tamoikin says, his art fund, that is funding TES research, was on a verge of a major transaction that could allow his business to take a quantum leap forward. Project TES would get much stronger and his adversaries knew that. Shortly after, Mikhail was kidnapped that transaction halted, while he had to spend a lot of his savings on security, relocation, health and wellbeing of his family. This resulted in significant setbacks, which he is just starting to recover from.
 
Nevertheless, Prof. Mikhail Tamokin is now alive and well. The Tamoikin Art Fund and the Project TES have shown resilience in the face of extreme adversity. Mikhail, his family, friends, colleagues and enterprises came out of these misfortunes stronger and more confident that ever before. Prof. Tamoikin vowed to continue his fight against the organized crime in the art world. He already published a number of articles, gave several interview and many lectures.
 
You can write to Prof. Mikhail Tamokin at: www.tamoikin.com/contact
 
By George Markoff
Translation by Dmitry Tamoikin

Notes and references:
 

• New reports  about Prof. Tamoikin’s kidnapping in Ukrainian press:
  • http://www.unn.com.ua/uk/news/1490649-pidpriyemets-zumiv-vtekti-vid-vikradachiv-stribnuvshi-u-dnipro
  • http://hronika.info/kriminal/77537-predprinimatel-sbezhal-ot-svoih-pohititeley-prygnuv-v-dnepr.html
  • http://cripo.com.ua/?sect_id=10&aid=198244

 

• Watch Prof. Tamoikin’s presentation in the Ministry of Defence of Lithuania https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO6xDBHH2JI

 

• 2014 Shout Out UK interview with Prof. Tamoikin when he was on Maidan: http://www.shoutoutuk.org/2014/01/24/ukraine-the-revolution-grows-where-will-it-all-end/

 

• Tamoikin Art Fund’s July 3, 2015 Shout Out UK report where this criminal case 18-458/1 and the $30 million dollar gold helmet are published. One month later Mikhail Tamoikin was kidnapped: http://www.shoutoutuk.org/2015/07/03/the-shocking-counter-terrorism-report/

 

• Article “Kiev allows torture and runs secret jails, says UN”:  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kiev-allows-torture-and-runs-secret-jails-says-un-vwlcrpsjn

 

• Lithuanian art collector’s son kidnapped: http://ru.delfi.lt/news/crime/zaderzhany-podozrevaemye-v-pohischenii-ikon-za-50-mln-litov.d?id=28228119

 

• Lithuanian citizens are serving as Ukrainian ministers and high-ranking policemen: http://24tv.ua/golovniy_politseyskiy_vilnyusa_pratsyuvatime_v_ukrayini_n646397

 

• Shot, Alexander Ruvin - Director of Institute of Criminology of Ukraine: http://en.censor.net.ua/news/361520/highprofile_cases_expert_oleksand_ruvin_was_shot_at_three_times_attack_connected_to_his_professional

 

• Col. Valeriy Stepanovich Kur (ret.) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кур,_Валерий_Степанович

 
French citizen kidnapped in Ukraine: http://newsoboz.org/proisshestviya/politsiya-zaderzhala-pohititeley-frantsuzskogo-grazhdanina-09052016172019


All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org

At the end of the twists and turns in this expose, the viewer is ready to see Browder sink through the floor on a direct transfer to hell like Don Giovanni in the closing scene of Mozart’s opera

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

Despite all the threats of lawsuits and physical intimidation which William Browder brought to bear over the past couple of months to ensure that this film would not be screened anywhere, on Monday, 13 June, it was shown privately in a museum of journalism in Washington, D.C. 

No doubt, the courage of the museum’s directors gave heart to others, and now there is talk that the film will be shown publicly in Norway, where its production company is located, but where an attempt several weeks ago to enter it into a local festival for documentaries was rejected by the hosts for fear of law suits. Moreover, a Norwegian court has in the past week declined to hear the libel charges which Browder’s attorneys were seeking to bring against the film’s director and producers.

In this brief essay, I will not go into the background issues of how the wealthy and influential investment banker William Browder has been moving heaven and earth to suppress it.  I dealt with that issue in my account of the cancelled screening of the film in the European Parliament at the end of April where I was a member of the audience:

http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2016/04/28/the-empty-seat-william-browder-once-again-takes-charge-at-th-1150958.html

Instead, I will devote a few words to the film itself, which I have now seen privately. 

​The Magnitsky Act. Behind the Scenes is an amazing film which takes us through the thought processes, the evidence sorting of the well-known independent film maker Andrei Nekrasov as he approached an assignment that was at the outset meant to be one more public confirmation of the narrative Browder has sold to the US Congress and to the American and European political elites. That story was all about a 36 year old whistleblower “attorney” (actually a bookkeeper) named Sergei Magnitsky who denounced on Browder’s behalf the theft of  Russian taxes to his boss’s companies amounting to $230 million and who was rewarded for his efforts by arrest, torture and murder in detainment by the officials who perpetrated the theft. This shocking tale drove legislation that was a major landmark in the descent of US-Russian relations under President Barack Obama to a level rivaling the worst days of the Cold War.   

At the end of the film we understand that this story was concocted by William Browder to cover up his own criminal theft of the money in question, that Magnitsky was not a whistleblower, but on the contrary was likely an assistant and abettor to the fraud and theft that Browder organized, that he was not murdered by corrupt Russian police but died in prison from banal neglect of his medical condition. 

The cinematic qualities of the film are evident. Nekrasov is highly experienced as a maker of documentaries enjoying a Europe-wide reputation. What sets this work apart from the “trade” is the honesty, the integrity of the film-maker as he discovers midway into his project that key assumptions of his script are faulty and begins an independent investigation to get at the truth.
It is an inconvenient truth that he stumbles upon, because it takes him out of his familiar milieu of ‘creative people’ who are instinctively critical of the Putin regime and of its widely assumed violation of human rights and civil liberties. We see how well-known names in the European Parliament, in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, in NGOs that are reputed to be watchdogs, in the team of court investigators in New York have taken on faith the arguments and documentation (largely in Russian and inaccessible to them) which they received from William Browder and then rubber-stamped his story as validated without making any attempt to weigh the evidence. Their intellectual laziness and complacency is captured fully on film and requires no commentary by the director. One of those especially skewered by her own words is German Bundestag deputy (Greens) Marieluise Beck. It is understandable to me now that I have viewed the film why she was one of the two individuals whose objections to its showing scuttled the screening in the European Parliament in April.  By the end of The Magnitsky Act, Nekrasov finds that he has become a dissident in his own subculture within Russia and in European liberal circles.

Another exceptional and striking characteristic of the filmmaker is his energetic pursuit of all imaginable leads in his investigative reporting. Some leads end in “no comment” while others result in exposing whole new ranges of lies and deception in the Browder narrative.  Nekrasov’s diligence is exemplary even as he takes us into the more arcane aspects of the case such as the course of money flow from the alleged tax fraud. These bits and pieces are essential to his methodology and justify the length of the movie, which approaches two hours.

Nekrasov largely allows William Browder to self-destruct under the weight of his own lies and the contradictions in his story-telling at various times. His camera is always running, even if his subjects are not thinking about the consequences of being taped. Browder’s supposed lapses of memory, set in the context of involuntary facial expressions of stress and nervousness, will be used against him by the viewer even if they would be thrown out by a judge in a court of law.

At the end of the twists and turns in this expose, the viewer is ready to see Browder sink through the floor on a direct transfer to hell like Don Giovanni in the closing scene of Mozart’s opera. Nothing so colorful occurs, but it is hard to see how Browder can survive the onslaught of this film if and when it gets wide public viewing.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide.

All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org

I have been asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the realignments occurring among states there, and the prospects for the achievement of renewed stability in the region.  I’m tempted to suggest that you read my latest book, America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East.  So much has gone wrong that it is hard to be either brief or optimistic.
 
Two hundred and eighteen years ago today, Napoleon was preparing to take Malta.  His purpose was to clear an obstacle to his seizure of Egypt for revolutionary France.  He was able to invade Egypt on July 1, 1798.  Napoleon’s campaign there and in Palestine kicked off a two-century-long effort by the West to transform the Middle East.  European imperial powers and, latterly, the United States, have repeatedly sought to convert Arabs, Persians, and Turks to the secular values of the European Enlightenment, to democratize them, to impose Western models of governance on them in place of indigenous, Islamic systems, and more recently to persuade them to accept a Jewish state in their midst.
 
This experiment in expeditionary, transformative diplomacy has now definitively failed.  The next administration will inherit a greatly diminished capacity to influence the evolution of the Middle East.  Amidst the imbecilities of our interminably farcical election season, it has proven expedient to blame this on President Obama.  If only he had bombed Syria, repudiated his predecessor’s agreement to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq, refused to compromise with Iran on nuclear matters, knuckled under to Netanyahu, or whatever, the old order in the Middle East would be alive and well and the United States would still call the shots there.
 
But this is nonsense.  Our estrangement from the Middle East derives from trends that are much deeper than the manifest deficiencies of executive and congressional leadership in Washington.  Americans and our partners in the Middle East have developed contradictory interests and priorities.  Where shared values existed at all, they have increasingly diverged.  There have been massive changes in geo-economics, energy markets, power balances, demographics, religious ideologies, and attitudes toward America (not just the U.S. government).  Many of these changes were catalyzed by historic American policy blunders.  In the aggregate, these blunders are right up there with the French and German decisions to invade Russia and Japan’s surprise attack on the United States.  Their effects make current policies not just unsustainable but counterproductive..
 
Blunder number one was the failure to translate our military triumph over Saddam’s Iraq in 1991 into a peace with Baghdad.  No effort was ever made to reconcile Iraq to the terms of its defeat.  The victors instead sought to impose elaborate but previously undiscussed terms by UN fiat in the form of the UN Security Council Resolution 687 – “the mother of all resolutions.”  The military basis for a renewed balance of power in the Gulf was there to be exploited.  The diplomatic vision was not.  The George H. W. Bush administration ended without addressing the question of how to replace war with peace in the Gulf.
 
Wars don’t end until the militarily humiliated accept the political consequences of their defeat.  Saddam gave lip service to UNSCR 687 but took it no more seriously than Netanyahu and his predecessors have taken the various Security Council resolutions that direct Israel to permit Palestinians to return to the homes from which it drove them or to withdraw from the Palestinian lands it has seized and settled.  Like Israel’s wars with the Arabs, America’s war with Iraq went into remission but never ended.  In due course, it resumed.
 
The United States needs to get into the habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies.
 
Blunder number two was the sudden abandonment in 1993 of the strategy of maintaining peace in the Persian Gulf through a balance of power.  With no prior notice or explanation, the Clinton administration replaced this longstanding approach  with “dual containment” of both Iraq and Iran.  For decades, offshore balancing had permitted the United States to sustain stability without stationing forces other than a very small naval contingent in the Gulf.  When the regional balance of power was undone by the Iran-Iraq War, Washington intervened to restore it, emphasizing that once Kuwait had been liberated and Iraq cut back down to size, U.S. forces would depart.
 
The new policy of “dual containment” created a requirement for the permanent deployment of a large U.S. air and ground force in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar as well as an expanded naval presence in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.  The political and socioeconomic irritants this requirement produced led directly to the founding of al Qa`ida and the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.  “Dual containment” was plausible as a defense of Israel against its two most potent regional adversaries, Iran and Iraq.  But it made no sense at all in terms of stabilizing the Gulf.
 
By writing off Iraq as a balancer of Iran, dual containment also paved the way for the 2003 American experiment with regime removal in Baghdad.  This rash action on the part of the United States led to the de facto realignment of Iraq with Iran, the destabilization and partition of Iraq, the destabilization and partition of Syria, the avalanche of refugees now threatening to unhinge the EU, and the rise of the so-called “Islamic state” or Da`esh.  With Iraq having fallen into the Iranian sphere of influence, there is  no apparent way to return to offshore balancing.  The U.S. is stuck in the Gulf.  The political irritations this generates ensure that some in the region will continue to seek to attack the U.S. homeland or, failing that, Americans overseas.
 
The United States needs to find an alternative to the permanent garrisoning of the Gulf.
 
Blunder number three was the unthinking transformation in December 2001 of what had been a punitive expedition in Afghanistan into a long-term pacification campaign that soon became a NATO operation.  The objectives of the NATO campaign have never been clear but appear to center on guaranteeing that there will no Islamist government in Kabul.  The engagement of European as well as American forces in this vague mission has had the unintended effect of turning the so-called “global war on terrorism” into what appears to many Muslims to be a Western global crusade against Islam and its followers.  Afghanistan remains decidedly unpacified and is becoming more, not less Islamist.
 
The United States needs to find  ways to restore conspicuous cooperation with the world’s Muslims.
 
Blunder number four was the inauguration on February 4, 2002 – also in Afghanistan – of a campaign using missiles fired from drones to assassinate presumed opponents.  This turn toward robotic warfare has evolved into a program of serial massacres from the air in a widening area of West Asia and northern Africa.  It is a major factor in the metastasis of anti-Western terrorism with global reach.
 
What had been a U.S. problem with a few Islamist exiles resident in Afghanistan and Sudan is now a worldwide phenomenon.  The terrorist movements U.S. interventions have spawned now have safe havens not just in Afghanistan, but in the now failed states of Iraq and Syria, as well as Chad,  Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai, Somalia, and Yemen.  They also have a growing following among European Muslims and a toehold among Muslim Americans.  We have flunked the test suggested by the Yoda of the Pax Americana, Donald Rumsfeld.  We are creating more terrorists than we are killing.
 
The United States needs a strategy that does not continuously reinforce blowback.
 
Blunder number five was the aid to Iran implicit in the unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003.  This rearranged the region to the severe strategic disadvantage of traditional U.S. strategic partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia by helping to create an Iranian sphere of influence that includes much of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.  It showed the United States to be militarily mighty but geopolitically naive and strategically incompetent.  Rather than underscoring American military power, it devalued it.  The U.S. invasion of Iraq also set off a sectarian struggle that continues to spread around the globe among the Muslim fourth of humanity.  The U.S. occupation culminated in a “surge” of forces that entrenched a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad and that only its authors consider a victory.
 
The United States needs to deal with the reality and the challenges to others in the region of the Iranian sphere of influence it helped create.
 
Blunder number six has been to confuse the motives for terrorism with the religious rationalizations its perpetrators concoct to justify its immorality.  Many of those who seek revenge for perceived injustices and humiliations at the hands of the West and Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, or who are treated as aliens in their own countries in Europe, give voice to their anger in the language of Islam.  But their political grievances, not heretical Islamic excuses for the mass murders they carry out, are what drive their attempts at reprisal.  Islamism is a symptom of Arab anguish and rage.  It is a consequence, not a cause of Muslim anger.
 
Religious ideology is, of course, important.  It is a key factor in justifying hatred of those outside its self-selected community.  To non-believers, arguments about who is a Jew or whether someone is a true Muslim are incomprehensible and more than a little absurd.  But to the intolerant people doing the excommunicating, such debates define their political community and those who must be excluded from it.  They separate friend from foe.  And to those being condemned for their disbelief or alleged apostasy, the judgments imposed by this intolerance can now be a matter of life or death.
 
In the end, the attribution of Muslim resentment of the West to Islam is just a version of the facile thesis that “they hate us because of who we are.”  This is the opiate of the ignorant.  It is self-expiating denial that past and present behavior by Western powers, including the United States, might have created grievances severe enough to motivate others to seek revenge for the indignities they have experienced.   It is an excuse to ignore and do nothing about the ultimate sources of Muslim rage because they are too discomfiting to bear discussion.  Any attempt to review the political effects of American complicity in the oppression and dispossession of millions of Palestinians and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths caused by U.S. sanctions, bombing campaigns, and drone warfare is ruled out of order by political correctness and cowardice.
 
The United States needs to work with its European allies, with Russia, and with partners in the Middle East to attack the problems that are generating terrorism, not just the theology of those who resort to it.
 
Blunder number seven was the adoption after the 1973 Yom Kippur War of a commitment to maintain a “qualitative military edge” for Israel over any and all potential adversaries in its region. This policy has deprived Israel of any incentive to seek security through non-military means.  Why should Israel risk resting its security on reconciliation with Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors when it has been assured of long-term military supremacy over them and relieved of any concern about the political or economic consequences of using force against them?
 
Confidence in Israel’s qualitative military edge is now the main source of moral hazard for the Jewish state.  Its effect is to encourage Israel to favor short-term territorial gains over any effort to achieve long-term security through acceptance by neighboring states, the elimination of tensions with them, and the normalization of its relations with others in its region.  U.S. policy inadvertently ensured that the so-called “peace process” would always be stillborn.  And so it proved to be.
 
Israel’s lack of concern about the consequences of its occupation and settlement of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza has facilitated its progressive abandonment of the universalist Jewish values that inspired Zionism and its consequent separation from the Jewish communities outside its elastic borders.  U.S. subsidies  underwrite blatant tyranny by Jewish settlers over the Muslim and Christian Arabs they have dispossessed.  This is a formula for the moral and political self-delegitimization of the State of Israel, not its long-term survival.  It is also a recipe for the ultimate loss by Israel of irreplaceable American political, military, and other support.
 
The United States needs to wean Israel off its welfare dependency and end the unconditional commitments that enable self-destructive behavior on the part of the Jewish state.
 
Blunder number eight has been basing U.S. policies toward the Middle East on deductive reasoning grounded in ideological fantasies and politically convenient narratives rather than on inductive reasoning and reality-based analysis.  America’s misadventures cannot be excused as “intelligence errors.”  They are the result of the ideological politicization of policy-making.  This has enabled multiple policy errors based on wishful thinking, selective listening, and mirror-imaging.  Examples include:
 
✦ The conviction, despite UN inspections and much evidence to the contrary, that Saddam’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction was ongoing, representing an imminent danger, and could only be halted by his overthrow;
 
✦ The supposition that, despite his well-documented secularism, because he was an Arab, a Muslim, and a bad guy, Saddam must be colluding with the religious fanatics of al Qaeda;
 
✦ The assumption that the U.S. military presence in Iraq would be short, undemanding, and   inexpensive;
 
✦ The belief that the overthrow of confessional and ethnic balances would not cause the disintegration of societies like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon or ignite a wider sectarian conflict;
 
✦ The spurious attribution to people in Iraq of political attitudes and aspirations found mostly among exiles abroad;
 
✦ The ludicrous expectation that U.S. forces invading Iraq would be greeted as liberators by all but a few;
 
✦ The unshakeable presumption that Israel must want peace more than land;
 
✦ The impulse to confuse mob rule on the Arab street with a process of democratization;
 
✦ The confidence that free and fair elections would put liberals rather than Islamist nationalists in power in Arab societies like Palestine and Egypt;
 
✦ The supposition that the removal of bad guys from office, as in Libya, Yemen, or Syria, would  lead to the elevation of better leaders and the flowering of peace, freedom, and domestic tranquility there; and
 
✦ Imagining that dictators like Bashar Al-Assad had little popular support and could therefore  be easily deposed.
 
I could go on but I won’t.  I’m sure I’ve made my point.  Dealing with the Middle East as we prefer to imagine it rather than as it is doesn’t work.  The United States needs to return to fact-based analysis and realism in its foreign policy.
 
All these blunders have been compounded by the consistent substitution of military tactics for strategy.  The diplomatic success of the Iran nuclear deal aside, the policy dialogue in Washington and the current presidential campaign have focused entirely on the adjustment of troop levels, whether and when to bomb things, the implications of counterinsurgency doctrine, when and how to use special forces, whether to commit troops on the ground, and the like, with nary a word about what these uses of force are to accomplish other than killing people.  When presented with proposals for military action, no one asks “and then what?”
 
Military campaign plans that aim at no defined political end state are violence for the sake of violence that demonstrably create more problems than they solve.  Military actions that are unguided and unaccompanied by diplomacy are especially likely to do so.  Think of Israel’s, our, and Saudi Arabia’s campaigns in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen.
 
By contrast, military interventions that are limited in their objectives, scale, and duration, that end or phase down when they have achieved appropriate milestones, and that support indigenous forces that have shown their mettle on the battlefield can succeed.  Examples include the pre-Tora Bora phase of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the first round of Russian intervention in Syria.
 
The objectives of what was initially conceived as a punitive raid into Afghanistan in October 2001 were (1) to dismantle al Qaeda and (2) to punish its Taliban hosts to ensure that “terrorists with global reach” would be denied a continuing safe haven in Afghanistan.  The United States pursued these objectives by supporting mostly non-Pashtun enemies of the mostly Pashtun Taliban who had proven politico-military capabilities and staying power.  A limited American and British investment of intelligence capabilities, special forces, air combat controllers, and air strikes tilted the battlefield in favor of the Northern Alliance and against the Taliban.  Within a little more than two  months, the Taliban had been forced out of Kabul and the last remnants of al Qaeda had been killed or driven from Afghanistan.  We had achieved our objectives.
 
But instead of declaring victory and dancing off the field, we moved the goal posts.  The United States launched an open-ended campaign and enlisted NATO in efforts to install a government in Kabul while building a state for it to govern, promoting feminism, and protecting poppy growers.  The poppies still flourish.  All else looks to be ephemeral.
 
Mr. Putin’s intervention in Syria in 2015 relied for its success on ingredients similar to those in the pre-Tora Bora U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.  The Russians committed a modest ration of air power and special forces in support of a Syrian government that had amply demonstrated its survivability in the face of more than four years of Islamist efforts to take it down.  The Russian  campaign had clear political objectives, which it stuck to.
 
Moscow sought to reduce the complexities of Syria to a binary choice between life under the secular dictatorship of the Assad regime and rule by Islamist fanatics.  It cemented a Russian-Iranian entente.  It hedged against the likelihood that the Syrian Humpty Dumpty cannot be reassembled, ensuring that, whatever happens, Russia will not lack clients in Syria or be dislodged from its bases at Tartus and Latakia.  Russia succeeded in forcing the United States into a diplomatically credible peace process in which regime removal is no longer a given and Russia and Iran are recognized as essential participants.  It retrained, reequipped, and restored the morale of government forces, while putting their Islamist opponents on the defensive and gaining ground against them.  The campaign reduced and partially contained the growing Islamist threat to Russian domestic tranquility, while affirming Russia’s importance as a partner in combating terrorism.
 
Moscow also put its hands on the stopcock for the refugee flow from West Asia that threatens the survival of the European Union, underscoring Russia’s indispensable relevance to European affairs.  It demonstrated its renewed military prowess and reestablished itself as a major actor in Middle Eastern affairs.  And it showed that Russia could be counted upon to stand by protégés when they are at risk, drawing an invidious contrast with the American abandonment of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.  The cost of these achievements has been collateral damage to Russia’s relations with Turkey, a price Moscow appears willing to play.
 
But state failure in Syria continues, as it does in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.  Jordan and Bahrain are under pressure.  Tunisia and Turkey – once avatars of democratic Islamism – seem to be leaving democracy behind.  Israel is strangling Gaza while swallowing the rest of Palestine alive.  Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain are in a near state of war with Iran, which is in the midst of a breakthrough in relations with Europe and Asia, if not America.  Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar are trying to stay out of the fight.  Once the region’s Arab heavyweight, Egypt now subsists on handouts from the Gulf Arabs and cowers under martial law.  Sudan has been partitioned, sidelined, and ostracized by the West.
 
The Middle East kaleidoscope has yet to come to rest.  We can see that the region’s future political geography will differ from its past and present contours.  But we cannot yet say what it will look like.
 
“More-of-the-same” policies will almost certainly produce more of the same sort of mess we now see.  What is to be done?  Perhaps we should start by trying to correct some of the blunders that produced our current conundrums.  The world’s reliance on energy from the Gulf has not diminished.  But ours has.  That gives us some freedom of maneuver.  We should use it.
 
We need to harness our military capabilities to diplomacy rather than the other way around.  The key to this is to find a way to reenlist Iraq in support of a restored balance of power in the Gulf.  That would allow us reduce our presence there to levels that avoid stimulating a hostile reaction and to return to a policy of offshore balancing.
 
This can only be done if Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Sunni states rediscover the differences between the varieties of Shi`ism in Iraqi Najaf and Iranian Qom.  The shi`ism of Najaf tends to be fatalistic and supportive of Iraqi nationalism.  The shi`ism of Qom is more assertively universalistic and activist. The Saudis and their allies need to make common cause with Shi`ite Iraqis as Arabs rather than castigate them as heretics.  The limited normalization of Iranian relations with the West, including the United States, is an inevitability. The strategies of our Arab partners in the region need to anticipate and hedge against this.  And we need to prepare them to do so.
 
Such an adjustment will take some very tough love from the United States.  It will require the Saudis and their allies to back away from the policies based on Salafi sectarianism they have followed for the better part of this decade and reembrace the tolerance that is at the heart of Islam.  It will also require some measure of accommodation by them with Iran, regardless of the state of US-Iranian relations.  Without both a turn away from sectarianism and the achievement of a modus vivendi with Iran, the Saudis and their allies will remain on the defensive, Iraq will remain an extension of Iranian influence, and the region will remain inflamed by religious warfare.  All this will spill over on Americans and our European allies.
 
Islamism is an extreme form of political Islam – a noxious ideology that invites a political retort.  It has received none except in Saudi Arabia.  There a concerted propaganda campaign has effectively refuted Islamist heresies.  No effort has been undertaken to form a coalition to mount such a campaign on a regional basis.  But such a coalition is essential to address the political challenges that Muslim extremists pose to regional stability and to the security of the West.  Only the Saudis and others with credibility among Salafi Muslims are in a position to form and lead a campaign to do this.  This is an instance where it makes sense for the United States to “lead from behind.”
 
For our part, Americans must be led to correct our counterproductive misunderstanding of Islam. Islamophobia has become as American as gun massacres.  The presumptive candidate of one of our two major parties has suggested banning Muslims from entry into the United States.  This is reflective of national attitudes that are incompatible with the cooperation we need with Muslim partners to fight terrorist extremism.  If we do not correct these attitudes, we will continue to pay not just in treasure but in blood.  Lots of it.
 
Finally, the United States must cease to provide blank checks to partners in the region prone to misguided and counterproductive policies and actions that threaten American interests as well as their own prospects.  No more Yemens.  No more Gazas or Lebanons.  No more military guarantees that disincentivize diplomacy aimed at achieving long-term security for Israel.
 
The obvious difficulty of making any of these adjustments is a measure of how far we have diverged from an effective approach to managing our relations with the Middle East and how impaired our ability to contribute to peace and stability there has become.  Our mainstream media is credulous and parrots the official line.  Our politicians are devoted to narratives that bear almost no relation to the realities of the Middle East.  Our government is dysfunctional.  Our politics is … well, … you pick the word.
 
Frankly, the prospects that we will get our act and our policies together are not good.  But history will not excuse us for acting out Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing more of the same and expecting different results.  We won’t get them.
 
Did you like this article? Share it with your friends!

© Chas Freeman 
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Brown University

​
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org

In his eulogy to Mohammed Ali at the Louisville memorial service, Rabbi Michael Lerner reminded us all of the distinguishing feature of “The Greatest,” that from the start of his career he spoke Truth to Power and paid the price when he was stripped of his heavyweight title for five years.

In that spirit, and in the presence of eminent national leaders, Rabbi Lerner listed major issues that concern Liberal Progressives, adding one issue that is often overlooked. He said that attempts to subjugate peoples and rule the world have been made over the last 10,000 years and they have never worked. In what follows, I will try to expand on that very important observation and how it bears on our own and broader humanity’s prospects for survival now.

One of the very sad consequences of the monopoly control of mainstream print and electronic media, as well as of the two houses of Congress by the ideologists of Neoconservatism and Liberal Interventionism is that the broad American public, including instinctively skeptical Progressives, is clueless about the level of risk of all out nuclear war we are incurring by our current and projected policies of global domination. America’s seemingly irresistible force is coming up against indomitable resistance from Russia and China and the result is an escalating confrontation that we have not seen since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I had a personal awakening to the reality of the false sense of security that pervades American society some 18 months ago when I participated in a Peace Day event organized at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where the keynote speaker was Noam Chomsky and a number of other leading personalities in the nationwide antiwar movement also held forth. The auditorium which accommodated our opening, plenary session was filled by perhaps 350 activists, many of them gray headed veterans from the 1960s Vietnam War resistance, but also a representative sampling of students from the Greater Boston area. When we broke up for workshops, perhaps 250 chose the then very fashionable issue of the Islamic State, whose exploits had filled our newspapers with beheadings and bloody terror taking place in distant lands. My own workshop on the red hot civil war then raging in Donbass, in southeastern Ukraine, which was becoming a proxy war between Russia and the USA, drew in a total of 5 auditors.

And the workshop on nuclear dangers, which I looked in on when my session closed, had perhaps 10 auditors. The organizers were busy presenting slides showing what could happen in a European city like Rotterdam if “bad guys” managed to detonate a dirty radioactive bomb in the city center. A better scenario for substituting phony threats for real ones could not have been written by Pentagon strategists. The thought that we might find ourselves in a nuclear exchange with Russia did not cross the minds of organizers or auditors alike. And yet to my understanding, the level of risk of war coming out of the Great Power stand-off in Ukraine, and of its accidentally or otherwise spilling out of control and going nuclear was vastly greater than anything that could ever befall us from the still unchecked advance (now thwarted) of radical Islamists in the Middle East.
My point is not to ridicule the very earnest and well-intentioned anti-war campaigners whose ranks I joined that day. It is to demonstrate how and why the highly tendentious reporting of what we are doing in the world and what others are doing to us, combined with selective news blackouts altogether by major media has left even activists unaware of real threats to the peace and to our very survival that American foreign policy has created over the past 20 years and is projected to create into the indefinite future if the public does not awaken from its slumber and demand to be informed by experts from countervailing views. We are living through a situation unparalleled in our history as a nation where the issues of war and peace are not being debated in public.

Moreover, the risk of accidental war has moved quickly beyond where it was just 18 months ago. Now we are entering upon implementation of very provocative US-directed military expansion of NATO activities at the borders of Russia. The ongoing war games code-named Anaconda-16 in Poland numbering 31,000 troops, 17,000 of them Americans, are rehearsing a NATO seizure and occupation of Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, just a few miles away. President Putin’s remark at the start of the exercises was that any move into Russian territory would elicit a nuclear response that would not be limited to the European theater but would be directed at the mainland USA. These were clear words, but I greatly doubt any of my readers has heard about them.

The NATO Summit planned forJuly 6-8in Warsaw will confirm plans to greatly expand the presence of NATO troops and heavy equipment in bases being built in Poland as well as in the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In response to this unanticipated threat to its national security, Russia is now moving a large part of its armed forces from the center of the country to the Leningrad Oblast, bordering on Estonia. The distances separating Russian and NATO forces will be miniscule.

In this sense, we are now two minutes to midnight on the nuclear catastrophe clock.
What can we do about this dire situation? First, we can write to the editors of our major national daily newspapers and complain about the wholly one-sided view of international affairs that they are feeding us day by day. We should politely demand that they open their op-ed pages to responsible experts and non-experts who challenge our present foreign and defense policies as being aggressive and provocative. The same letters should be sent to the producers of news programming and panel discussions at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other leading electronic media who have systematically black-balled all those who do not agree with the Washington Narrative ever since the start of the Information Wars with Russia in 2007.

Secondly, we should write to our Congressmen and women demanding that Congressional hearings on foreign relations and relations with Russia and China in particular must cease to be phony exercises at which only those who support our present policies or call for still more drastic poking the Russians in the eye get invited to testify. Hearings which bring in as well those who believe as I do that we are presently on course for Armageddon should get C-SPAN coverage and give the American public a chance to judge for itself from authoritative and credible sources and not only from “alternative media” that can easily be dismissed by the establishment.
​
These recommended actions will not by themselves turn back the minute hand on the Clock, but they may stop its progression and give us a very much needed time out to fix policies that are wrongheaded and extremely dangerous.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2016

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide.

All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org

Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues! 

At first, I wanted to spare you much reading about disturbing politics during the Spring time so there was no newsletter in May. But then events just happen--and not just in US presidential contest--and I could not resist the temptation of sharing the best with you .

On May 11-13, 2016, I was invited to speak at a three-days seminar on US-Russia relations at St. Petersburg State University. Head of the Department of International Relations Professor Boris Shiriaev has been conducting this event for 25 years, that is about as long as new, post-soviet Russia has existed. This time the Seminar was appropriately titled "Stability or Chaos: the Role of US-Russia Relations in the emerging World Order".

There were more than 100 speakers from among the faculty, graduate students and students, as well as several speakers from other Russian universities and from abroad, including three from the United States. At the plenary session I spoke about RAGA, about its role in public diplomacy, along with several other American NGOs engaged in efforts to promote better relations between our countries. It must be pointed out that I was invited there thanks to Anastasia Boyarkina (see a pic below) who wrote a course paper about RAGA. Before my talk is posted on RAGA site, I am happy to give a link to a Russian language report about this Seminar for those who know Russian.

  <<Стабильность или хаос: роль российско-американских отношений в грядущем мировом порядке. Такова тема XXV Российско-американского семинара, который проходил с 11 по 13 мая в Санкт-Петербургском государственном университете.Репортаж Анны Жерновниковой: http://spb.media/text/stabilnost-ili-haos-rol-rossiysko-amerikanskih-otnosheniy-v>>

The the Seminar was well organized, Russian language presentations were simultaneously translated into English and posted on a large wall screen, and the same was done with English language presentation. Another positive trend was a greater level of student participation both as speakers and in the audience.

Just as during my previous report (Antidote 26) about the forum on US-Russia academic exchange at George Washington University, the unanimous conclusion was that Russia needs a greater intellectual exchange with US academic community. To prepare for next year 2017 Seminar, Professor Shiriaev welcomes inquiries from the United States. Below are the addresses:
Professor Boris Shiriaev <Shiriaev@mail.sir.edu>
Yulia Boguslavskaya <rosam.sem@yandex.ru>
Natalia Tsvetkova <tsvetkoffa@mail.ru>

Just today I received a very important article written by an old RAGA friend Professor Vladimir Cherny, Doctor of Math and Physics, who has travelled extensively in the USA for the past 30 years and witnessed the emergence of High-Tech literally from individual garages. Pointing out "brain drain" from Russia, Dr. Cherny now calls on the Russian government to create conditions in Russia conducive to small individual enterprise and increase access to global developments in IT. His article was published in the Nezavisimaya (Independent) Gazeta
http://www.ng.ru/nauka/2016-06-08/14_democracy.html

Well, the rest of this letter is in English, including a very disturbing report of Dmitry Tamoikin, RAGA key associate, about the travails of his father Mikhail Tamoikin, former high official in the Ukrainian government in charge of national treasures registry.

Professor hit by car in Lithuania, kidnapped and tortured in Ukraine
Eastern European Mafia behind the attacks
http://ahtribune.com/world/europe/967-tamoikin.html
Last August Mikhail Tamoikin was kidnapped at gunpoint in the center of Kiev, chained and dragged into a car, taken to a boat, where he was beaten and tortured. Miraculously he managed to escape by jumping into the river and swimming for 12 km to safety. After calling the local police, Mikhail quickly learned that the corrupt Ukrainian government officials and “on the take” law enforcement officers were responsible for his kidnapping
Back to the USSR: A Call for Glasnost and Perestroika as We Re-think U.S. Foreign Policy

By Edward Lozansky and Gilbert Doctorow - Tuesday, June 7, 2016

In what follows, we will direct attention to foreign policy, because the impending failure there and our going off the cliff into World War III has to be the country’s first concern. Come a nuclear war, which, sadly, is more likely now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and all thoughts about the minimum federal wage, the sustainability of social security and transgender use of toilets will go out the window.

The clamp-down on our free speech about foreign policy began imperceptibly in the name of bipartisanship in the second term of Bill Clinton when a hybrid Neocon/Neoliberal Interventionist ideology fully replaced pragmatism and common sense at the State Department under Madeleine Albright and rippled out further to the Pentagon and Presidential Administration.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/7/back-ussr-call-glasnost-and-perestroika-we-re-thin/

Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics, University of Kent, UK, May 26, 2016

http://ccisf.org/west-sleepwalk-doomsday-war-russia/

Russia sees much of this as a direct threat to its own security, and threatens to deploy nuclear-capable missiles to Kaliningrad and even possibly Crimea. The Russian armed forces are just about to test the prototypes of the S-500 Prometei air and missile defence system (also known as the 55R6M Triumfator M), capable of destroying ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), hypersonic cruise missiles and planes at over Mach 5 speeds. The weakening or even abrogation of the INF andSTART treaties could destroy decades of painstaking arms control negotiations.

US Exceptionalism Has No Place in a Multipolar World, May 27, 2016, Robert Shines

History has proven that no particular state’s hegemony is eternal. Just as facing concerted military opponents on the field of battle, like Napoleon at Waterloo, can bring an end to a hegemon’s reign, so too can internal factors. In today’s world, in which ideas move across continents literally at the speed of light, the U.S has a harsh decision to make. Either it can realize that the world is inevitably moving towards multipolarity, and help devise a new international security architecture which recognizes other states’ legitimate core interests.

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/us-exceptionalism-has-no-place-in-a-multipolar-world/

Handle the Bear with care. By Stephen Kinzer   APRIL 28, 2016
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/27/handle-bear-with-care/nCjSP6oTynVBVLOqEYp3xM/story.html
The decision to expand NATO was made haphazardly. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin opposed it. So did General John Shalikashvili, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. But Clinton was moved by appeals from Eastern European leaders, felt that he had to display leadership at a moment when his Bosnia policy was failing, wanted to please ethnic voting blocs at home, and was swayed by what one scholar has called “his own Wilsonian orientation toward spreading liberalism.” He never convened a top-level meeting to ask his advisers to present their views.

Sharon Tennison, an antiwar activist, who takes American public diplomats to Russia, pointed me to Professor Stephen Cohen's the latest:
War With Russia Without Public Debate? By Stephen F. Cohen, June 8, 2016

NATO is continuing its military buildup and “exercises” on Russia’s borders, Moscow is taking “counter-measures,” while the US mainstream media remains silent.

Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US -Russian Cold War. (Previous installments are at TheNation.com). This installment returns to the large-scale NATO military buildup on Russia’s Western frontiers, again on land, sea, and in the air, now featuring Operation “Anaconda-2016,” an “exercise” involving more than 30,000 American and other NATO forces in Poland.

http://www.thenation.com/article/war-with-russia-without-public-debate/

As to the New Russia's contribution to saving wolrld cultural monuments in Syria, Rachel Douglas of the LaRouche movement me sent the following:

<<I hope you'll post in your various venues the link to the full recording of the concert given today in the Palmyra amphitheatre. Music of Bach, Shchedrin and Prokofieff, performed by Valery Gergiev and the Mariynsky Theater Orchestra, violinist Pavel Milyukov, 'cellist Sergei Roldugin. Full report and concert recording is archived here by RTR state TV.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtEefNbxc4w
The concert itself begins at around 6 minutes. Gergiev makes the introduction in Russian and in English, other than that the narration is in Russian.
 Yours,
Rachel Douglas>>

You may want to try the Russian rendition of the same
5 мая 2016
https://russia.tv/brand/show/brand_id/60500/
О ПРОЕКТЕ
"С молитвой о Пальмире". Концерт Валерия Гергиева
Концерт Симфонического оркестра Мариинского театра под управлением народного артиста Российской Федерации В.Гергиева "С молитвой о Пальмире. Музыка оживляет древние стены" на площадке всемирно известного амфитеатра Пальмиры. 

Dmitry Tamoikin's report about the increasing lawlessness in Ukraine is indirectly confirmed by the United National Antiwar Coalition in New York

As you know, UNAC has been increasingly involved with supporting the anti-fascist movement in Odessa, Ukraine. (Seehttp://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/eyewitness-odessa-anti-fascist-resistance-in-ukraine/)

The situation in Odessa is getting more difficult as the right-wing federal government and the growing fascist movement try to suppress progressive voices. In response, we are now formalizing our work as the Odessa Solidarity Campaign, which will be an ongoing UNAC project.

This campaign, which has been endorsed by Odessa’s Council of Mothers of May 2, will continue to support the Mothers and their call for an international investigation into the massacre of scores of progressives on May 2, 2014, as well as educating the public about the role of the U.S. in the developing economic and political crisis in Ukraine as a whole. This crisis must be seen in the context of the continuing U.S.-led NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, which violates an agreement the U.S. made with Russia at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union The result has been the military encirclement of Russia, creating a dangerous situation with a major nuclear power.
            
Please visit the new OSC website at www.odessasolidaritycampaign.org, sign the Council of Mothers’ petition for an international investigation and sign up to receive updates from the campaign. If you’re interested in being more active in this effort, please send an email to contact@odessasolidaritycampaign.org or UNACpeace@gmail.com and we will help you get involved.

The one American who did the most to help RAGA bring to Americans the features of Russia's unique culture is Professor William Brumfield who teaches Russian language and Literature at Tulane University. Recently Russia honored him by publishing an extensive interview with him
МЕЖ ДВУХ БЕРЕГОВ
Виктор Гавриков
Этот удивительный человек родился за океаном, но уже более сорока лет живет на две страны. Там, в США, – дом и кафедра, здесь, в России, – Толстой, Достоевский и архитектура Русского Севера. И я, слава богу, выбрал Калифорнийский университет Беркли. Этот университет оказался просто идиллией для меня: там были такие корифеи, как Глеб ­Петрович Струве, сын известного русского политика ­Петра Струве, было много других умных людей, которые блестяще знали русскую культуру, а вот отдел славистики был небольшой. Там можно было общаться с самыми известными славистами. Так что я продолжал заниматься русским языком и русской литературой.

http://www.russkiymir.ru/media/magazines/article/206783/

Predictably, the last item in this Antidote 27 is a series of William's photographs of the Russian city of Belgorod

Белгород --  Город первого салюта! 
Текст и фотографии ​Уильям​а Брумфилд​а​ для сайта RBTH​ (​зарубежный проект ​"Российск​ой Газеты").  150-я статья в серии.


My current article for Russia beyond the Headlines is devoted to the city of Belgorod, whose history is closely connected with Russia's defense  To see the slide show full screen, click the 4-arrow icon at lower right of photo window.  One of my photos shows the cathedral under construction in 1999. 

This is the 150 th of my articles and photo essays on Russia's architectural and cultural heritage for the foreign-language service of the Russian national newspaper Rossiiskaia Gazeta. A unified link to the series can be found at: http://rbth.ru/discovering_russia   Through this link a total of 4,341 photographs from my documentary work in Russia are now accessible.

WB

Sincerely,

W George Krasnow (Vladislav Krasnov)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

Malice to None. Good Will  to All. 
Peace and Justice to the World.

 миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

 From RAGA site:

"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."

All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org