MOSCOW, March 5. /TASS/. The brief conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov initiated by US Secretary of State on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty ministerial meeting in India was a planned election campaign action, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday.

"It was not even advertising. It was a planned action to develop so to say muscles on the international track during their election campaign," she said in an interview with the Voskresny Vecher (Sunday Evening) program on the Rossiya-1 television channel.

She noted that the brief conversation between the two countries’ top diplomats was followed by a "media orgy" in the American mass media. "When Blinken, the Department of State, and then Blinken again began to tell a saga, and it cannot be called anything other, the song of songs that they virtually had talks, virtually multi-format talks, virtually on disarmament matters," she said.

She stressed that the current US administration can "boast no achievements," having failed to isolate Russia and all they have to do is to "play dirty little tricks, which they are doing." "But they need a positive agenda and they tried to model an element of such constructive agenda in a couple of minutes when Blinken snagged some part of Lavrov’s clothes on the sidelines of the G20 meeting," she added.

Blinken said on Thursday he had had a brief conversation with Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial meeting and called on his Russian counterpart to cooperate in the interests of reaching a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.