by Don Pelton

I’ve been almost exclusively focused on Ukraine lately because the US is now in greater danger of a nuclear war than it has been in my lifetime, and I say this as one who was twenty years old at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The following interview (by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now) with Katrina vanden Heuvel, longtime editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, expresses most of my concerns better than I’m able to express them. vanden Heuvel and her husband, the late professor Stephen Cohen, spent decades traveling in and studying Russia. She notes that we have no vital interest in Ukraine, that Biden is generally following bad advice, that a willingness to negotiate for peace is not equivalent to condoning Putin’s bad behavior, that there is an active antiwar movement in Russia, that Biden’s obsession with Ukraine is affecting his intended “pivot to China,” which is now seen more as an enemy than as a potential partner in combating global problems.

I’d add that the propaganda function of our Western media has so vilified Russia and Russians that anyone who speaks of peace is effectively dismissed as delusional. Listen to Katrina vanden Heuvel. Her take on Russia and Ukraine is the among the sanest I’ve heard.