The Lozansky Doctrine

The Russian state began building their propaganda apparatus following what I will term the “Lozansky Doctrine” by launching two supposedly independent English language broadcasters, which became a foundation for the creation of other pro-Kremlin groups.

The Lozansky Doctrine specifies that no Russian government funds or would be overtly provided for political activities, to bolster claims that America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) law should not apply to their foreign lobbying efforts.

The other goal of Lozansky’s Doctrine is to distance messengers from the Russian state, providing plausible deniability for the Kremlin and increased authenticity for their propagandists, who claim to be independent voices.

Lastly, the Lozasnky Doctrine describes using businesspeople to advance Russia’s political aspirations in America.

In the last year, both RT and Sputnik News have been forced to register under FARA as official media organs of the Russian Federation’s government, because of their state-directed editorial viewpoints.

Dr. Lozansky got personally involved in the creation of the New York Institute for Democracy and Cooperation (IDC), which was the Kremlin’s official “unofficial” think tank, with offices in Moscow and Paris.

According to the Lozansky Doctrine, the IDC obtains funding from private individuals, but it is run by a lawyer very close to the Kremlin, and the Russian Foreign Minister appointed him to that position.

However, the Kremlin’s press agent Ketchum stepped out out of line with the Lozansky Doctrine, because their extensive advance work for the launch of the IDC is reported in a lengthy FARA disclosure filed with the US Department of Justice.

Strangely, the Kremlin’s PR company met with Dr. Lozansky and the head of the IDC New York before meeting with State Department officials the following month, which are some of the activities the Kremlin paid $400,000 monthly to arrange.

Dr. Lozansky’s book describes achieving the Russian state’s political goals with private spending, from the “diaspora” of emigres who left the Soviet state before it collapsed.

Part 5 of the 5 part series, Chapter 2 of the Grand Old Putin Party:

Russia’s written guide to lobbying and influence in American politics

Dr. Edward Dimitrievich Lozansky — a longtime Republican insider and Russian-American professor at Moscow Engineering Physics Institute — wrote a manual that appears the basis of the Russian government’s doctrine and actions to use non-government agents of influence and emigres to influence American politics.

In 2004, Dr. Edward D. Lozansky wrote the book “Ethnic Lobbying in the US. On the prospect of a Russian-American lobby” as an expert text about Russian-American ethnic lobbying in America for Vladimir Putin’s government.

Lozansky’s book: “Этносы и лоббизм в США. О перспективах российского лобби в Америке.”

Lozansky’s book was published in 2004 by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official publishing house “International Relations.”

By 2011, Dr. Lozansky said that his book became a “textbook in some of the Russian educational institutions and it is even used as a Ph.D. thesis source.” (translation)

Dr. Lozansky’s book proposed the following overall plan for Russia to create an integrated political and influence lobby in the United States:

— Promote Russia as a partner of the West in the fight against terrorism.

— Create information centers to provide American politicians and society with full and objective information about Russia.

— Create investment projects.

— Increase scientific, business, education and cultural exchanges between our two countries.

— Start a discussion about the workings of Russian law.

— Hold conferences, seminars, and forums on the direction of relations between the US and Russia.

It seems like writing such a book and working with a state-run publishing company would by necessity involve some input or direction from a Russian government agency and payments, and trigger the disclosure rules under America’s FARA law.

The book’s primary use is to help Russia’s cloud of propagandists, state-run agencies and think tanks to evade or publicly excuse their unreported foreign directed political activities that might cause FARA registration.

Dr. Lozansky has a long and well documented professional history as an agent of influence for the Kremlin, as well as a Republican insider and right-wing activist in Washington, D.C.

His book supplies a considerable part of the theoretical basis for Russia’s influence operations, as well as the rationale for obscuring the Russia Today and Sputnik News networks direct financial support from Putin’s government as well as that of other entities.

This story will also detail his links to the Kremlin’s propaganda agencies through the years, and how he groomed the Russian Foreign Ministry’s stable of pro-Putin shills to influence American Congressmen and public opinion through the years, without registering as the agent of a foreign power, or as a lobbyist.

Former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert shakes hands with Dr. Lozansky at the 2002 World Russia Forum.

His forums used to connect U.S. Congressmen with Russian influencers, propagandists, businesspeople and Russian parliamentarians; celebrated by Putin’s embassy in Washington.

Now, Lozansky’s pro-Putin oriented World Russia Forum has been reduced to claiming credit for one of the Embassy’s ceremonial events.

Also, Dr. Lozansky’s frequent co-author Global Strategic Communications Group principal, former GOP Senate staffer and Katehon think tank member James Jatras, submitted a petition on WhiteHouse.gov, asking that President Trump hold a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin.

That is the full extent of this year’s World Russia Forum.

Ten days after their petition went up, Fox News suddenly reported that Trump’s Ambassador to Russia is, in fact, working on such a meeting.

Dr. Lozansky has a long-running, sometimes very public relationship with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who was a regular speaker at the professor’s World Russia Forums.

He says his relationship with Kislyak actually dates to the Soviet-era when the two men were colleagues at the same Moscow nuclear physics academy, which amplifies the importance of the professor’s book.

It was published right after Kislyak became Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister in 2003.

“To be sure, the Kremlin uses diaspora groups, NGOs, and cultural organizations to conduct influence operations around the world,” says former National Security Council Russia specialist Dr. Michael Carpenter who is now the Senior Director Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

“It also uses the state-run cultural organization Rossotrudnichestvo,” says Carpenter, “as a cover assignment for its intelligence operatives.”

The Rossotrudnichestvo was launched by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in 2008, and through its US office, the Russian Cultural Center, it sponsored Dr. Lozansky’s World Russia Forums from 2008 through 2012.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute — an American creationist and climate change denial 501c3 company — also began sponsoring Dr. Lozansky’s forums when its “Real Russia” project was launched in 2008. The Institute removed the Real Russia project from its website, but remains in Archive.org, along with two other sites to assist Dr. Lozansky’s efforts.

Discovery Institute even created a brand new website for the forum and a new Russia blog for Dr. Lozansky when he got involved with the mission two years later because it needed funding:

“to provide a true, accurate picture of life in modern-day Russia, to promote realistic U.S./Russian relations, and to become a recognized and trusted source of information regarding Russia for U.S. policymakers, business leaders, media and the general public.”

Dr. Lozansky began fighting against the Jackson-Vanik sanctions in 2004 — here, testifying to the federal government’s US Helsinki Commission — which he continued in 2010 in Congress.

In 2011, Dr. Lozansky sued President Obama in federal court along with Anthony Salvia — who helped the professor’s activist group communicate with the Reagan White House in 1984 in his role as a Pentagon official — and is currently Director of a public relations firm called the Global Strategic Communications Group.

They lost.

In 2012, Congress enacted the Magnitsky Act sanctions against human rights violators, which also repealed the outdated Jackson-Vanik sanctions against Russia.

Notably, Anthony Salvia appeared on Dr. Lozansky’s list of American University in Moscow fellows since 2012, in his role with the anti-NATO non-profit American Institute in Ukraine, but someone has removed his between this February and now.

Notably, Russia’s attack on America’s 2016 elections was very openly aimed at generating quid pro quo to secure Donald Trump’s support to repeal the new Magnitsky Act sanctions, including follow ups after the polls closed.

Over the years, Russian journalists have publicly questioned why Dr. Lozansky doesn’t register as an agent of the Russian Federation under FARA; his answers are typically evasive, long, and sometimes hostile.

Afterword by a Republican Congressman

The “Afterword” to Lozansky’s book was written by Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), which was a stand-alone 2001 essay entitled “A New Time, A New Beginning.”

Former Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) holding widely shared essay on US-Russia relations.

A sometimes artifact laden documentary by Transterra Media calls Weldon’s “New Time” essay the forum’s foundational document in the documentary’s footage of the 2002 World Russia Forum in a 25-minute runtime.

The documentary features video of former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert — later convicted of violating the Patriot Act to cover up speaking at the 2002 World Russia Forum event who said, “I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the work of Curt Weldon, who has been an undying advocate in building those relationships with the Duma.”

There’s also a clip of the former Representative from Pennsylvania personally presenting his essay to Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush in the film.

Dr. Lozansky and Rep. Weldon at the 2002 World Russia Forum

Rep. Weldon spent an extraordinary time in Russia during that era, and gained access to places most Americans never imagined going; for example, holding a meeting with the head of the FSB in Lubyanka, the infamous headquarters of the KGB on Felix Dherzinsky Square.

Weldon published his own comprehensive history of US-Russia relations just last year in National Interest (the CFTNI’s official outlet) at the same time that the Weldon-Rovt “peace plan” was being circulated in Trump’s inner circle, which notes that Russian President Vladimir Putin abandoned his engagement strategy around the time of Bush’s war of choice in Iraq in 2003.

Current Washington Post reporter Shane Harris wrote a story for the National Journal entitled “The Troublemaker” about Weldon, which detailed his efforts investigating 9/11. Weldon told him:

“I was chairman of the defense research committee. Nobody was more identified with data mining and data collaboration than I was…. I had been involved in it up to my eyeballs!”

Late last year, California Senator Dianne Feinstein included Weldon in an investigative demand letter related to the Cambridge Analytica data theft scandal.

Former Rep. Weldon also worked hard to get the Pentagon to cut a $97 million check to IEG Group — a Kremlin-linked company for access to WMD sites because it had “access to the inner circle of Putin” in addition to members of the Duma.

Weldon cited IEG’s CEO Vladimir Petrosyan as one of his key allies in the fight to remove the Soviet-era relic Jackson-Vanik sanctions against Russia, in a 2003 Moscow Times column.

By 2006, Rep. Weldon — then Co-Chair of the Congressional Ukrainian caucus— co-sponsored a successful bill to remove those sanctions against Ukraine.

IEG also employed Alexander Bortnikov — who is then and now the head of the Russian FSB intelligence service— as well as the Russian Army’s Chief of Staff at the time.

It turned out that Weldon’s former Chief of Staff Russell Caso Jr.’s wife was getting paid by IEG’s CEO for a ‘make work’ job during that time. But the Department of Justice prosecuted him after he omitted his wife’s side-work from his financial disclosures.

Caso Jr. pled guilty to honest services fraud conspiracy for failing to report funds paid from IEG to his wife before he started working for Weldon, which he publicly maintains was an accident. He was later exonerated on appeal by on a precedent-setting legal technicality, but declined to talk to us publicly about his time in D.C.

Rep. Curt Weldon left Congress in 2006 under the cloud of an FBI investigation.

A public raid on his daughter’s house — related to $500,000 in lobbying payments she accepted from Russian natural gas company Itera— is what ultimately sunk Weldon’s re-election campaign, but didn’t result in criminal charges against the ex-Congressman.

Russia’s state-run oil company Rosneft bought Itera in 2013.

Former Rep. Weldon went back to Moscow on July 12th, 2016 during the course of the last presidential election, ostensibly to meet longtime friend Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the head of FIDE, the International Chess Federation.

Last week, The Atlantic reported that Weldon’s close relationship with Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko — an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen involved in a back-channel peace plan— has drawn him into the orbit of the Trump Russia affair.

Weldon is the subject of a current Senate Judiciary Committee investigation.