MOSCOW, December 28. /TASS/. ‘Business as usual’ with the US is impossible until Washington abandons its aggressive policy against Moscow and returns the Russian diplomatic property, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday in comments on an article by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson published in the New York Times.
The diplomat drew attention to "a confrontational mood" of Tillerson’s article. "I don’t know what had prompted this publication that was full of a big number of oddities, maybe some fear because of a growing influence of Moscow and Beijing on the global arena," she went on.
"We don’t like the current state of Russian-American relations either," the diplomat stated. "But it is necessary to clearly understand and put it honestly that a decline in bilateral times came not through the fault of Russia, but through the fault of the US," she said.
"And certainly ‘business as usual’ with the US is impossible until they review their aggressive policy, and in particular, return the [diplomatic] property in the US stolen from the Russian side, and not just from the Russian side, the officials, but from our country, the Russian Federation, our people," she stressed.
In his article in the New York Times, Tillerson said "there cannot be business as usual with Russia" without a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine situation. Tillerson said the US "today has a poor relationship with a resurgent Russia that has invaded its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine in the last decade and undermined the sovereignty of Western nations by meddling in our election and others’".
However, he said "we recognize the need to work with Russia where mutual interests intersect". "Nowhere is that more evident than in Syria," Tillerson said.