A senior Russian official has canceled a planned visit to the United States, claiming he feared a second civil war being waged by opposing political forces there.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia's Roscosmos State Space Corporation, who served as deputy prime minister until May 2017, said Thursday that rising tensions between Republicans and Democrats were leading to a breakdown of U.S. society. This included the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), one of many federal agencies affected by a government shutdown due to an inability for the rival U.S. parties to agree on funding for a border wall proposed by President Donald Trump.
"I think that America is actually engulfed by its second civil war now," Rogozin told the Rossiya-24 TV channel, as translated by the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.
He called Washington's sanctions against Moscow—which began under the administration of President Barack Obama—"an outrage," arguing that "this is complete international lawlessness and I absolutely don’t care about those motives which guided people in the Obama administration or the current Senate."
Rogozin is not the first to raise the prospect of a second Civil War amid the polarized political climate in the U.S. In June, former Trump adviser Roger Stone warned of a potential civil war in an interview with Newsweek and, days later, University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Reich argued that "serious social unrest" may be on the way, even if an actual civil war remained unlikely. Later that month, Republican Congressman Steve King tweeted, "America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry" and "After that comes Ft. Sumter," referring to the Confederate raid on the U.S. fort that sparked the Civil War.
Amid all this talk of Civil War, a poll that same month found 31 percent of likely U.S. votersthought the prospect of a second such conflict breaking out in the next five years was likely.
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