Dear CCI Friends and Readers,
CCI’s September 2019 trip to Russia is covered below by America’s respected think tank and magazine, The National Interest. The article was co-authored by two CCI travelers, Krishen Mehta and Dennis Ortblad. They traveled to Moscow and St.Petersburg in addition to three Crimean cities, during which time fellow CCI delegates were visiting 17 other Russian cities from Kazan to Yakutia in Eastern Russia. Mehta and Ortblad dove into writing to explain their impressions of the “inscrutable Russia” and what they think we Americans should know and do relative to Russia, the other nuclear superpower.
After scanning the article, let us know if you are interested in traveling on CCI’s June 2020 trip which will explore multiple Russian cities and peoples, their histories, points of view, political leanings, hopes and their sense of the state of the world in 2020. We will send you a “no obligation” application.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
3 Steps to Reviving the Russian Relationship
It is time to improve relations between Russia and the West with a policy of realism towards Moscow.
November 5, 2019
By Dennis Ortblad and Krishen Mehta
We need to deal with Russia as it is, not as we wish it to be. And our enemy is not Russia. If anything, our enemy is misinformation and fear.
It is this vivid impression that we took away from our recent study tour in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Crimea, organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives. Members of our delegation went across Russia including Kaliningrad, Krasnodar, Novgorod, Orenburg, Perm, Ufa, and Yekaterinburg.
At a time of tense relations marked not only by the conflict in Ukraine, but also by deep U.S. domestic political rifts over Russia’s role in the 2016 election, we knew our mission made us vulnerable to dismissal as “Putin apologists.” But we took the risk. It was important to search for areas where relations could gradually improve. We felt troubled relations with Russia put our own U.S. security interests at stake.