MOSCOW, June 15. /TASS/. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov believes that Russian-US relations have stabilized at a very low level. He was speaking to TASS in the wake of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s statement Russian-US relations were getting worse.
"We keep a close watch on such statements, just as everything that we get in the form of public messages from the administration," he said. "Possibly one can say that the secretary of state is correct in that our relations are going through one of the worst periods."
"I am not certain if they continue to deteriorate, as it was predicted (by the US Secretary of State). I’d rather say that we have achieved stability at an extremely low point," Ryabkov stated.
On sanctions
Ryabkov said he does not believe Russian-US relations are getting worse at the moment. At the same time should the proposed anti-Russian sanctions be codified Moscow will have to recognize their turn for the worse, Ryabkov told TASS.
"If steps pushing relations into a stalemate are taken, I mean the codification of sanctions that were introduced by the previous administration, which cannot be ruled out, and also if other measures follow, we will have to state with regret that the US opinion regarding their (bilateral US relations’) further worsening does agree with the reality," Ryabkov said.
"We keep a close watch on such statements, just as everything that we get in the form of public messages from the US administration," he said. "Possibly one can say that the secretary of state is correct in that our relations are going through one of the worst periods."
"I am not certain if they continue to deteriorate, as it was predicted (by the US Secretary of State). I’d rather say that we have achieved stability at an extremely low point," Ryabkov stated.
"In principle I believe that sanctions-obsessed politicians in the United States literally dictate this agenda and this ill-natured approach of theirs," Ryabkov said, adding that Russia was not the sole target of such policies.
"The United States is not the sole decision-making center. We will be doing our utmost to derive benefits from this in order to accelerate our development," Ryabkov said.
Earlier, the US Senate supported the idea of including an amendment on tighter anti-Russian sanctions in a bill originally geared to stepping up pressures on Iran. US legislators plan to strip the White House of the right to ease sanctions at its sole discretion. For that the president will have to present to Congress a clear list of persons from whom the sanctions are to be lifted, and also to persuade the legislators Russia has revised its policy along a number of tracks, including Syria and Ukraine.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee Russian-US relations were getting worse. He said that such a state of affairs posed a threat to peace and that the world’s two greatest nuclear powers could not afford to have a relationship of this kind.