“I do not comment on our daily contacts with our colleagues. Secondly, I had instructions not to discuss sanctions. We never discussed sanctions with anybody. And I assure you, I have honestly followed the instructions,” Kislyak told Rossiya-24.
“Sanctions aren’t our thing,” the retired diplomat said. “We don’t discuss or bargain about sanctions, because we believe they were implemented in an illegal, politically aggressive way to begin with.”
While it would be difficult to lift the newly-imposed restrictive measures, Kislyak does not believe the US and Russia are back to the Cold War.
“No, it’s not the Cold War,” he said. “The problem in our relations, as I have tried to say, is in the sense of absolute exceptionalism of the Americans and their purported right to tell everyone else what is good and what is bad.”