Scott Ritter, the former Marine and UN weapons inspector, who has become a leading peace activist, announced today on his blog and then again at weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), that he has organized a meeting on June 18, held jointly in St. Petersburg in Russia and in Kingston, New York of Russian and American citizens, whose purpose is to break through the Russophobia in the U.S. by getting American and Russians to meet and talk to each other. The event, Ritter writes on his post, will be on the 40th anniversary of the historic, groundbreaking 1985 “Leningrad-Seattle” Citizens’ Summit organized by two legendary journalists, Phil Donahue of the United States and Vladimir Pozner of the Soviet Union.
The moderators for the two connected events will be Ritter in the U.S. and Pavel Balobanov in Russia. Ritter says in the announcement that “the participants will be doing what we collectively can only hope our respective leadership will do—engage their citizen counterparts in constructive dialogue which seeks to better relations between their two nations.”
