The political warfare in the US hampers Washington’s relations with Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Vietnam’s national broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV), China’s CCTV and Phoenix TV.
“I held a meeting with US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo in Helsinki last year. We also talked on the phone a couple of times after that,” he said. “We agreed to step up efforts to assess the current state of Russia-US relations,” Lavrov added.
According to the Russian top diplomat, although the two countries’ officials have held meetings and captured the artificial issues the Americans are creating, there has been no positive response as far as resolving these issues goes. “Their position remains unchanged: it was Russia that worsened relations so it has to change its ways. When such things are said at the Congress, I can understand it because a domestic political struggle is underway in which all is fair,” Lavrov went on to say. “But when they use the same figures of speech during closed-door consultations, there is nothing left to do but conclude that our American counterparts are not ready for constructive cooperation yet,” he noted.
“Perhaps, diplomats – and they are bureaucrats too – can see what is going on among top officials, how they fight with each other and ruffle each other’s feathers, so they prefer to keep quiet and refrain from putting initiatives forward,” the Russian foreign minister pointed out. “However, it has regrettably led to what happened to strategic stability, which is the most important area from the standpoint of global security,” Lavrov emphasized.