MOSCOW, August 28. /ITAR-TASS/. The United States, European Union and other countries that imposed sanctions on Russia will gain nothing from their policy and will reduce possibilities of productive cooperation, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Thursday.

“These countries will obviously not achieve the goals they are seeking from their policy of sanctions against Russia and will lessen chances for productive work in other issues they are interested in,” Sergei Ryabkov said adding that the sanctions could not be left without response.

Ryabkov said that Russia was feeling some negative effects from the western sanctions and seeing attempts “to complicate the solution of its security issues”. He said these attempts were worthless.

The United States should take concrete constructive steps to back its pledges, but it has not done so yet, Ryabkov said in an interview with International Affairs magazine, posted on the website of the country’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday.

“Unfortunately, Washington’s actions differ radically from those assurances and signals which we are receiving through closed-access diplomatic channels and in public comments from the US administration,” he said, adding that “the difference between words and deeds is dramatic".

“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."