Yuri Mamchur

Yuri Mamchur was a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow with Discovery Institute and creator of Russia Blog. He was born in Germany and grew up in Russia. Yuri first came to Orcas Island for a summer job at Rosario Resort in 2002, while attending law school in Moscow (not Idaho); years later, he bought three condos at the resort. Yuri has lived in Seattle, Nashville, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, and throughout his career has led business development and consulted with Fortune 500 companies, foundations, startups, media, and government agencies. Yuri earned his European law degree in 2003, Georgetown public policy in 2004, Vanderbilt MBA in 2011, and Vanderbilt Law School LLM (U.S. law degree for foreign-educated attorneys) in 2018. Most recently, Yuri served as the Director of Global Media and Advancement for Starkey Hearing Technologies. Yuri is a classically-trained pianist, music composer and producer, who recorded his second studio album on Orcas Island in 2004. Yuri considers Orcas to be his life’s true home. Throughout the year, you can find him running and swimming at the lakes and watching sunsets from Mount Constitution.

Archives

Putin’s License To Kill

Yuri Mamchur
June 28, 2006
This week Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is hosting Saudi prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz al Saud in Moscow. On Wednesday President Putin personally met with the prince and chose this particular meeting to announce to the world Russia’s response to the jihadists who murdered five Russian diplomatic workers last week in Iraq: “find and destroy”. Not many people in the world are aware that since Putin was appointed President in 1999, Russia has revived its tradition of hunting down terrorists abroad. Given the traditional centralization of powers in Russia and the common national goal of revenge, there will be no Russian newspapers posting details about ongoing counterterrorist operations on their front pages, as happens with the New York Times in America. The Russian Duma is also …

I’m Not Illegal

Another Perspective on the Immigration Debate
Yuri Mamchur
May 16, 2006
SEATTLE — As crowds of illegal immigrants march through America’s streets, I peer down at the protesters from my office here and wonder, “Why don’t I march with them?” Well, because I’m not illegal. In the last six years, while visiting this country and starting my new job with the free-market Discovery Institute, I have paid the U.S. government nearly $20,000 in visa and application fees. Of the money I’ve earned I have spent 90 percent of it in this country. I have volunteered nearly 2,000 hours with local non-profits. If you are a native-born American, you probably have no idea how U.S. visas work or how difficult they are to acquire. Briefly, a non-immigrant visitor’s visa operates as follows: Let’s say you decide that you want …