WASHINGTON, August 13. /TASS/. The US administration has no levers to influence the decisions of the Russian authorities, former US ambassador to Russia John Sullivan told Foreign Policy.

"If there were something we could do to pressure Russia to bend to our will, we would’ve already done that on Ukraine. What are we going to threaten them with now?" he said. According to the retired diplomat, Washington has already imposed sanctions on Moscow several times. "If I could come up with better sticks (leverage - TASS), we’d already be using them on Ukraine now," Sullivan added.

He also said that from the very beginning of his work as the American ambassador to Moscow, he "got access to virtually any top Russian advisor I wanted to speak to." "For virtually all of my tenure, I never had a problem with access. It was getting successful results from that access [to high-ranking Russian government officials]. It was getting successful results from that access," the former diplomat pointed out. At the same time, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has repeatedly stated that Washington is far from fulfilling all his requests for meetings with high-ranking representatives of the US administration.