MOSCOW, January 28. /TASS/. No meetings between the Russian and US presidents are scheduled for the near future, US Ambassador to Russia John Tefft said on Thursday.

"There is nothing scheduled at this point," Tefft said. "I think a lot of depends on addressing this specific issues that I’ve tried to highlight, Ukraine and Syria."

The last meetings of Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama took place on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, and at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.

"The point here is not to schedule meetings for the sake of meetings but to try to push ahead and try to resolve these problems that separate us at this point," he said.

Russia-US relations tarnished, but may improve this year

 According to the diplomat, the relations between Russia and the US may improve this year.

"The overall relationship is still tarnished because of our strong opposition to what Russia has done in Ukraine," Tefft said in an interview with three Russian news agencies. "Our desire is to move forward, to get a solution as prescribed in the Minsk agreements and then to try to move our own relationship forward."

"President Obama has made this point clear to President Putin at the meetings that they had," he said. "I hope 2016 will be a year when we can make some progress."