BREST, November 22. /TASS/. With his recent decisions, Joe Biden is trying to make it harder for successor Donald Trump to do anything constructive on Ukraine once he takes office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
"As for what can be expected from Biden and his outgoing administration, well, the ATACMS supplies and allowing the British and French to use Storm Shadows and SCALPSs certainly have an element of trying to leave as negative a legacy as possible for the next administration," he told a news conference after a joint meeting of the Russian and Belarusian foreign ministries’ boards.
"It seems that this desire, let’s say, to muck things up, can be seen in the current situation," he added.
According to Lavrov, such behavior is "typical of the Democrats." "In December 2016, just three weeks before Trump’s inauguration, as [former President Barack] Obama was about to leave office, he pulled the same trick on his successor. He expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, some 120 people, including their family members. What’s more, he demanded they leave Washington on a day when there were no direct flights from Washington, so they had to take a six-hour bus ride all the way to New York with their small children and belongings. In other words, they made things very uncomfortable," he recalled.
Moreover, in his words, Obama seized five Russian diplomatic facilities and to this day, access has not been given back. "And, of course, talking about Trump's first few weeks in office, when he planned to carry out a normal dialogue with the Russian Federation, those plans were largely undermined," Lavrov added.