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US does not hide that sanctions aim at regime change in Russia — diplomat

The way out of the current US sanctions situation will take many years, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said

MOSCOW, December 8. /TASS/. The goal of Washington’s sanctions is to create conditions for changing the regime in Russia, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Russia’s lower house of parliament on Monday.

“The fact is not concealed that the sanctions’ aim is to create social and economic conditions to carry out the regime change in Russia,” Ryabkov said, speaking on Russia-US relations.

The way out of the current US sanctions situation will take many years, Ryabkov said. “I am unprepared to say if we are witnesses to a rerun of the Cold War or for how long the current state of affairs will persist. One thing I know for certain: getting out of the current situation the US sanctions have produced will take many years.”

The “reset” of relations with Moscow has limited the possibilities of the United States to interfere into Russia’s internal affairs, Ryabkov noted. “The ‘reset’ was officially announced to have ended in 2008, and it allowed to ‘scale a boiler’ of the year in the relations in the 1990s,” the diplomat said. “One of the results of this period was narrowing US possibilities of meddling into our internal affairs,” he stressed.

Moscow is calm on tensions in the relations with the United States and is taking adjusted retaliatory measures, the deputy foreign minister noted. “We do not feel nervous about this, and our actions are adjusted,” he said.

Retaliatory measures against the United States are thought-out and well-balanced, and Russia will not announce its sanction counter-lists, Ryabkov said.

The United States is trying to force Russia into reconsidering its foreign policy concept for the stance taken over Ukraine, Ryabkov told the State Duma during hearings on Russian-US relations on Monday.

“The wish to tear the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries away from Russia has always been on the list of US foreign policy interests and early this year it manifested itself with particular aggressiveness,” he said. “The advocates of anti-Russian policies were given a go-ahead to stage a government coup. In line with the slogan ‘The end justifies the means’ they made radical nationalists their main attack force.

“Then a decision was made to ‘punish’ us — first for the peaceful and free expression of will by the people of Crimea and Sevastopol, and then for the stance over the events in the south-east of Ukraine.” Ryabkov added that in fact attempts were underway “to force Russia to reconsider its foreign policy concept.”