GENEVA, January 10. /TASS/. The Russian side does not see the situation at talks with the US on security guarantees as hopeless, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told journalists after Russian-US consultations on the issue on Monday.

"I don’t consider the situation hopeless," he said. "I think that the usefulness of the talks in Geneva is mainly in the fact that we were able for the first time to discuss the issues that were present previously sort of invisibly, they did exist, but kind of behind the scenes. Everybody understood that they existed, but pretended that it would be better not to deal with them. Now, a spade was called a spade, which in itself has a therapeutic effect on our relations with the West," Ryabkov said.

"Let us see how this all will be projected onto work in bilateral formats after the bilateral Russian-US format," he added. Ryabkov sees nothing surprising that the issue of NATO’s further expansion, "getting the legally binding guarantees to this respect, and the formal revocation of the decision by the 2008 Bucharest Summit, invites very serious objections, to put it mildly, from the US."

"Regretfully, there are also other aspects of the same kind, where we have opposite views," he stated. "Something that is absolutely important for us is categorically unacceptable for Americans. This is bad, since it shows that the American side underestimates the seriousness of what is going on. It’s also bad as some other aspects of the vast dossier in the sphere of arms control, the strengthening of strategic stability and security in general, depend on the absence of progress on that track."