MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. Russia and the United States remain divided over global security matters, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday after Russian-American talks.

According to him, the two states differ "both on missile defense, the Treaty on the Elimination of the Intermediate and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF Treaty) and on the issue of NATO expansion."

"But the main thing is that we have agreed to intensify the dialogue and make it more substantive in nature and make it stable so that to try to settle these questions, we agreed to continue contacts on all these and other issues on our common agenda," the Russian foreign minister said.

The minister also mentioned among these issues the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, including Libya, Yemen, as well as stressed "the need to break the deadlock in the Palestinian-Israeli settlement," reach "an agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis in line with international law, existing UN resolutions".

"In general, the region urgently needs to find a balance of interests of both the sides involved in each conflict and the key external players," Lavrov said.

"We’d like from the Russian side to emphasize the usefulness of contacts with the US secretary of state," he added. "We believe that these contacts are aimed at realizing the fundamental objective of our presidents to find solutions to problems both in our bilateral relations and in the international arena."