“There is nothing more alarming in our current relations with the US than inconsistency between US pledges to help improve the situation and practical support to Kiev getting broader, deeper and acquiring new shapes, as certainly Ukraine takes this support as indulgency to continue its deadlocked course and as some kind of sanction on a forcible suppression of protest in the country’s south-east,” the high-ranking diplomat said.
Meanwhile, “assurances are important, we do not drop them, but concrete constructive steps should follow US pledges,” Ryabkov said. “This does not happen yet, and quite the opposite takes place,” he said. “The example of fulfilling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initiative on OSCE monitoring at two crossings on Russian-Ukrainian border Gukovo and Donetsk also points to this.”
“The US said that they are interested in this, but in fact they had been hampering the OSCE Permanent Council to take the decision on the issue for more than two weeks,” the Russian deputy foreign minister said. “This is possible to say how large is a gap between Washington’s good wishes and intentions and what is really being done regarding the crisis in Ukraine."