This year Voices has participated in one peace delegation and organized one more of its own to Russia to explore the possibilities of peacemakers meeting each other and connecting. A description of this new project could be summed up in the words of Brian Terrell:
I am not sure that the term “Citizen Diplomacy” can be accurately applied to what we did and experienced in Russia. Certainly we hoped that by meeting Russian citizens we could help foster better relations between our nations. On the other hand, as much as the term suggests that we were acting even informally to defend or explain our governments’ actions, interests and policies, we were not diplomats. We did not go to Russia with the intention of putting a human face on or in any way justifying our countries’ policies toward Russia. There is a sense, though, that the only genuine diplomatic efforts being made between the U.S. and NATO countries at this time are citizen initiatives like our own little delegation. What the U.S. State Department calls “diplomacy” is actually aggression by another name and it is questionable whether the U.S. is capable of true diplomacy while it surrounds Russia with military bases and “missile defense” systems and carries out massive military maneuvers near its borders.