On July 6 and 7, 2009 Eurasia Foundation, New Eurasia Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted a Civil Society Summit in Moscow which coincided with presidential meetings between President Dmitry Medvedev and President Barack Obama. The civil society conference was called for deepening and diversifying the discourse between citizens of both countries. It aimed to address and find solutions to shared problems and to put US-Russian relations on a more solid footing.

More than 75 experts and practitioners from non-governmental organizations, media outlets and academic institutions throughout the U.S. and the Russian Federation took part in the two-day summit. Participants exchanged views and experience with the goal of developing recommendations for future collaboration between the countries in the following lines of work:

• Public Health
• Community Development
• Human Rights and Rule of Law
• Youth and Education
• Press and New Media
• Environment

Senior officials from both governments received agendas for collaboration and policy recommendations in all of these fields at the conclusion of the summit in Moscow. The conference was intended as a first step in a series of activities to include the implementation of joint projects, more active engagement between organizations and their respective governments in both countries. A second civil society summit is to take place in the U.S. in 2010.

Russian human rights defenders support the idea of organizing a bilateral commission on issues of US-Russian relations but object to assignment of Deputy Head of President Administration Vladislav Surkov (left) to the position of a coordinator оf Commission on Civil Society Problems.
‘His name is associated with negative tendencies of democracy development in the Russian Federation in recent years including restrictions of freedom of expression, liquidation of competitive political system and etc’, they said in their appeal, signed by such human rights defenders as Lyudmila Alexeeva (MHG), Svetlana Gannushkina, Oleg Orlov (Memorial) and others.