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US expert: Russian-US relations will not change only because of changing leadership

Talking about 2016 presidential election in the United State, Executive Director of the Center for the National Interest Paul Sanders said he finds it "very unpredictable"

MOSCOW, February 24. /TASS/. Relations between Moscow and Washington will not change only because of changing leadership in the United States, Executive Director of the Center for the National Interest Paul Sanders said on Wednesday.

Talking about 2016 presidential election in the United State, Sanders said he finds it "very unpredictable." "I think that at this point certainly we could have a Democratic president, which would in that case almost certainly be Hillary Clinton," he said at the meeting with Russian Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee chairman Konstantin Kosachev. "But we also could have a Republican president because (former) Secretary Clinton is not universally popular," he noted adding that "it’s much more difficult to predict on the Republican side who the nominee will be although Mr Trump has a certainly increasing and strong position."

Answering Kosachev’s question on whether the result of the elections will have an impact on Russian-US relations, Sanders said: "I suspect that in the United States and probably also in Russia those are wide-spread views that will not change easily because of a changing leadership. So the important question is do we have a leader who wants to try to change and whether the leadership in Russia reciprocates."