Is the Department of State the same thing as "International Affairs?

In light of Russia's continued sponsorship of terrorists in eastern Ukraine and its role in the London bombings and polonium poisoning, should Russia be designated a "State Sponsor of Terrorism"?

• http://www.state.gov/j/ct/list/c14151.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko#Alleged_Russia-al-Qaeda_connection In a July 2005 interview with the Polish newspaper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rzeczpospolita_(newspaper), Litvinenko alleged that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri, a prominent leader of al-Qaeda, was trained for half a year by the FSB in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagestan in 1997 and called him "an old agent of the FSB".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko#cite_note-iii-62http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko#cite_note-65 Litvinenko said that after this training, al-Zawahiri "was transferred to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan, where he had never been before and where, following the recommendation of his Lubyanka chiefs, he at once ... penetrated the milieu of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden and soon became his assistant in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko#cite_note-66 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/london/2005/07/318875.html A. Litvinenko: In reply to this question I can declare perfectly definitely, that the center of the global terrorism is not in Iraq , Iran , Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic . The terrorism infection creeps away worldwide from the cabinets of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin. And until the Russian special services are forbidden, dispersed and condemned, the terrorism will never stop: bombs will blow up, and blood will be shed. [...] I would like to repeat, that all the terrorists, whom I have named, were supported by the heads of the Soviet and Russian special services - Yury Andropov, Vladimir Putin, Nikolay Patrushev and others. These people are the main terrorists, and their place is not among the heads of the civilized countries, but on a dock. And until we condemn them, the same as in due time they condemned fascist Gestapo, the terrorism on the earth will not stop. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/276536/what-i-remember-nro-symposium/page/0/11?pg=3 by Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa (Ret.), highest-ranking intelligence official to defect from the Soviet bloc “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon,” KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me in 1972. Western Sovietologists generally limit themselves to recalling his brutal suppression of dissidence, his role in planning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and his pressure on the Polish regime to impose martial law. But the leaders of the KGB community, when I was one of them, looked upon Andropov as the father of a new era of international terrorism that profoundly changed our lives. Hijacked passenger planes became a KGB terrorist tool in 1969, two years after Andropov rose to head the KGB. Before I broke with Communism in 1978, he took credit for 16 major hijackings of Western passenger planes. They were all organized by his Department for Wet Affairs (“wet” being a euphemism for bloody) and carried out by Islamic terrorists trained by the KGB. http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=13975 Pacepa:  September 11, 2001 was directly rooted in a joint Soviet/Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operation conceived in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. The object of this joint operation was to repair Moscow's prestige by turning the Islamic world against Israel and by creating a rabid and violent hatred for its main supporter, the United States. The strategy was to portray the US, this land of freedom, as a Nazi-style "imperial-Zionist country" financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious "Council of the Elders of Zion" (the Kremlin's epithet for the US Congress), the aim of which was allegedly to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. In other words, the heart of the joint plan was to convert the historical Arab and Islamic hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States. We threw many millions of dollars at this gigantic task, which involved whole armies of intelligence officers. In the late 1960s, a new element was added to the Soviet/PLO war against Israel and American imperial-Zionism: international terrorism. Before 1969 came to an end, the KGB's Thirteenth Department-known in our intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs, wet being a euphemism for bloody-invented airplane hijacking. The KGB constantly lectured at us that no one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should feel safe anymore. The hijacked airplane became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy-and eventually the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001. http://www.interpretermag.com/putin-has-made-terrorism-an-integral-part-of-russian-state-policy-plamenyev-says/ Leaders of various countries have exploited terrorist attacks against their countries for their own purposes, but Vladimir Putin has made terrorism an integral part of Russian state policy, not only exploiting attacks but involving Russian security agencies and forces in terrorist actions as needed,http://kasparov.ru/material.php?id=541C0898A8B29. “Historical experience shows,” the Moscow commentator says, “that personal fears and the fears of particular power groups or rulers are behind many of these events” because they can use them to manipulate public opinion in directions that they want. Moreover, he says, “Terrorism has made the world dangerous and unpredictable, less stable and more pragmatic, and also put humanity on the edge of a new global war. If in the second half of the 20th century, it was acceptable to call terrorist activity ‘international terrorism,’ then in our time, terrorism…has evolved into ‘state terrorism.’” With Putin’s rise to power, “terrorism firmly entered [Russian] life,” first helping to power an obscure KGB lieutenant colonel to supreme power with the 1999 apartment bombings and then leading to war in the Caucasus, war in Georgia, “the annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine.” “Over the course of his rule, the authorities in the form of the Russian special services, having adopted ‘the science of terror’ have perfected and developed new methods of state terrorism, above all by having made the army and the media inalienable parts of it,” Plemenyev argues.

• Answer:

  Role in the London bombings?  Sorry, I'm not familiar with anything like that. The polonium incident was an assassination, not a terrorist act. The downing of MH17 wasn't exactly terrorism either.  It was a criminal act, (like shooting someone accidently in the middle of an armed robbery).  and they need to be punished (probably with the destruction of their forces in the Ukraine, who according to Putin aren't russians anyway). But I'm not going to call it terrorism on the part of Russia.  So no, they should not be on the list. That said, Russia needs to be told that it needs to grow up if it wants to join the circle of civilized nations.  And until they do, it's time to treat them like they act.  A paranoid, corrupt dictatorship.