CNN Video Transcript

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(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin are at one of the most dangerous points since the cold war. Vladimir Putin’s government is furious over an incendiary story by a U.S. government funded news agency Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports two U.S. officials with diplomatic passports were drugged last […]

Alleged drugging of U.S. diplomats in Russia

Russian officials are now saying the same thing happens to their diplomats in the U.S. Brian Todd – (CNN) – Russia is angrily denying allegations that it was behind the possible drugging of two U.S. diplomats at a Russian bar. The allegations only spiking tensions between the U.S. and Russia. Tensions between Washington and the […]

Deep Scars on the Russia Soul

Museum of the Great Patriotic War

Russia’s geography is primarily terrestrial, without significant warm water access to large bodies of water or strategic waterways. This factor drove some of its earliest Czarist-era and Soviet expansionist behaviors. The melting Arctic ice, with the gradual opening of the Northern Sea Route, was not part of this earlier calculus. Ever since the Mongols erupted […]

Russia’s Contradictory Relationship with the West

Checkpoint Charlie PRISM

Peter Zwack is the Senior Russia-Eurasia Research Fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute of National Security Studies. He is a retired U.S. Army Brigadier General and served as the U.S. Defense Attaché in Moscow, Russia from 2012 – 2014. Prelude: Recalling Operation Long Thrust On August 20, 1961, an American armored battle group of […]

Death of the GRU Commander

An American general remembers Russia’s complex military intelligence chief, who shaped the Ukraine incursion — and worked hard to bridge the East-West gap. In February 2014, contact ceased between U.S. and Russian military intelligence as part of an overall shutdown of defense relations in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. It was the […]

It’s High Time for US, Russian Militaries to Start Meeting Again

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It is increasingly dangerous in this cyber-fast world for the nuclear-tipped nations to have such a dearth of contact.  In January 2014, the U.S. and Russia’s highest military leaders and their staffs met in Brussels to discuss important security issues. The turmoil in Kyiv’s Maidan Square was intensifying, and the Sochi Olympics and Ukrainian President […]

With Paris, ISIS Has Declared War on Us. Here’s How We Should Respond.

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Posted: 11/19/2015 7:40 pm EST Updated: 11/19/2015 8:59 pm EST http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-b-zwack/ The ISIS attack in Paris was an attack on our global community. This will not end. We have to face this fact. The target of these attackers was non-combatant innocents. They will attack again. As much as we abhor the idea of more ground action […]

TORGAU ELBE

By Peter B. Zwack – – Thursday, April 2, 2015 Seventy years ago this April 25, American and Soviet military met as wartime allies against Nazi Germany in the closing days of World War II in an obscure and now long-forgotten place on the Elbe River called Torgau. This was a truly special embrace of […]