NASA startles with invitation to sanctioned Russian

A Trump administration official’s plan to host a sanctioned Russian nationalist in the U.S. in the coming months is raising alarms among Russia hawks in Washington.A Trump administration official’s plan to host a sanctioned Russian nationalist in the U.S. in the coming months is raising alarms among Russia hawks in Washington.

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NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine extended an October invitation for his counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, to visit NASA headquarters in Houston in early 2019. U.S.-Russia space cooperation is nothing new. But Rogozin is no typical rocket-science technocrat. He is an ultranationalist politician with a record of stark racism and homophobia who is under American sanctions, which typically bar him from entering the U.S. over his 2014 role, as deputy prime minister, in Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Bridenstine, a former three-term Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told the Russian state news agency TASS in mid-October that he had succeeded in temporarily waiving sanctions on Rogozin so that he could visit Houston and speak at Rice University, Bridenstine’s alma mater, sometime after the new year. The U.S. and Russia cooperate extensively on space exploration and, according to the TASS report, Bridenstine stressed the need for a “strong working relationship” with his counterpart.

Yet lawmakers from both parties and former national security officials are crying foul, saying the invitation undermines U.S. sanctions and would give a government-approved platform to an anti-American bigot.

“It absolutely sends the wrong message to lift sanctions, even temporarily, for the purpose of inviting him to speak to students at one of our nation’s premier universities,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leader of the committee’s investigation into 2016 Russian election interference.

"This is appalling," said Evelyn Farkas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia in the Obama administration. “It’s utterly inappropriate given who he is and the fact that he is on our sanctions list.”

More than two months after Bridenstine’s original invitation, however, the details remain sparse. A Dec. 7 TASS report said that Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is planning for Rogozin to visit in “early 2019,” but neither the U.S. nor Russia has announced a specific date. The Russian embassy declined to comment on the proposed visit, and NASA spokeswoman Megan Powers said only, “Planning for a potential visit by the Director-General is still underway.”

Russian relationship in space dates back to the 1970s,” she wrote. “NASA has historically invited the head of the Russian space agency to visit the United States. Following this precedent, and Administrator Bridenstine’s October visit to Russia to participate in crew launch activities to the International Space Station, NASA invited the Director-General of Roscosmos to visit NASA facilities in the United States and discuss our ongoing space-related cooperation.”

While the plan’s murkiness may reflect the delicate politics of a sanctioned Russian politician visiting the U.S. amid a huge investigation into Kremlin election interference, some Russia experts and space policy agreed with NASA’s stance. They described the invitation as a natural extension of U.S.-Russia cooperation on space, an area that both countries have worked to insulate from mounting tensions in other parts of their bilateral relationship.

"The partnership on the space station has persisted despite all these problems, and worked very well,” said John Logsdon, an emeritus professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “I think this invitation reflects the ongoing success of the partnership, rather than any broader political tensions." Logsdon pointed out that Bridenstine spoke last year at Moscow State University, making the Rice invitation reciprocal.

But Rogozin’s visit would be only the second time the U.S. is known to have waived sanctions to allow Russian officials to enter the country. In January, three top Russian intelligence officials secretly visited the U.S. to confer with their American counterparts. One of them, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, has been subject to U.S. sanctions, which bar entry to the United States, since 2014.

News of Naryshkin’s visit sparked controversy at the time, with critics saying the decision undermined Western sanctions meant to deter Russian aggression. Trump administration officials argued it was necessary for counterterrorism cooperation.

Several factors make Rogozin’s invitation, which has received little attention in the U.S., potentially more controversial. For one, there is no apparent pressing national security reason for the Russian space chief to visit the United States. A senior Obama administration official said that during that administration, if U.S. officials needed to meet with their sanctioned Moscow counterparts, they would do so in third countries, rather than waive sanctions to let the sanctioned Russians into the U.S.

And an invitation to speak at a prestigious American university is an honor that the government has not bestowed on other officials it has sanctioned.

The invitation to speak at Rice is even more striking in light of Rogozin’s history as a provocative anti-American ultranationalist. After co-founding the Rodina coalition in 2003, Rogozin got the party banned from regional elections in Moscow two years later over ads that compared migrants from the north Caucasus region to “garbage.” Earlier that year, several Rodina members of parliament signed a petition calling for Jewish organizations to be banned from Russia, an initiative that Rogozin disavowed.

“Wow,” said Heather Conley, a Russia expert and director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, in response to the invitation. “Rogozin is well known for his very destructive public comments about the U.S. What is difficult for me to understand is what is to be gained for giving a sanctioned individual a public platform."

A spokesman for Rice, Doug Miller, referred questions to NASA. “Rice has not invited Rogozin to the campus,” Miller said. “I don’t know what NASA is working on. … As far as we know, there’s no plan for Rogozin to visit Rice if he visits Houston.”

Bridenstine, whom Trump tapped to run NASA last September, has sought to highlight his rapport with Rogozin. He met with the Roscosmos chief in Moscow in mid-October, and tweeted a video in which he called U.S.-Russia space collaboration “a charge we have to keep.”

Russia experts say that Rogozin’s party, Rodina, was part of a Kremlin strategy of so-called controlled opposition, which encourages extremist opposition parties to create foils for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruling party and to float controversial ideas to see how they play with the Russian public.

In 2008, Rogozin made his alliance with Putin official, accepting a post as Russia’s ambassador to NATO, where he hung a portrait of Joseph Stalin in his office and made a point of thumbing the eye of the Western alliance. “The Americans and their allies again want to surround the den of the Russian bear?” he tweeted in 2010, in response to U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system to Romania. “The bear will emerge, and kick them in the ass.”

In 2011, Rogozin became deputy prime minister in charge of overseeing the Russian defense ministry, including its cyber warfare operations, which in recent years have frequently targeted the U.S. and its allies. In March 2014, he was one of seven senior Russian officials sanctioned by the Obama administration for their roles in the annexation of Crimea.

A year later, Rogozin tweeted that the West would “fall under the weight of Islamic State and gays” rather than from Russian aggression, according to Agence France-Presse.

Rogozin also has at least one connection to the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert American politics. In December 2015, he met with a delegation of National Rifle Association officials invited to Russia by Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty in December to conspiring with a different Kremlin official to infiltrate the U.S. political system.

In May, Putin appointed him to head Roscosmos, something of a demotion for Rogozin, who had overseen the space agency in his previous post as deputy prime minister.

Putin’s decision to put a notorious sanctioned official in charge of his space program also seemed designed to undermine sanctions, because the U.S. — as Rogozin is fond of pointing out — depends on Russian spacecraft to reach the international space station. The Trump administration’s invitation to Rogozin appears to vindicate Putin’s approach.

Meanwhile, Rogozin continues to needle the United States, making headlines last month for joking that Russia would verify NASA’s moon landings actually occurred.

In response to questions about the invitation, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee’s subpanel on space — said it exemplified the problems posed by NASA’s reliance on Roscosmos.

“Sen. Cruz believes that questions like these highlight the complications posed by the U.S. being completely dependent on Russia for transportation to and from low Earth orbit, as we unfortunately have been for the last seven years,” said a spokesman for the Republican senator. “That's why it is so important, for national and economic security, that America is once again building the capacity to take U.S. astronauts to space on U.S. rockets launched from U.S. soil."

Considered in a different light, the invitation makes perfect sense, according to Steven Sestanovich, a professor and Russia expert at Columbia University.

“If the Trump administration went looking for a Russian partner in its own image, Dima Rogozin would be their guy. He’s charming, cynical, corrupt, utterly unprincipled, thoroughly anti-American, a pugnacious show-off,” Sestanovich said. “Honestly, how could you do better?”