MOSCOW, April 29. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov believes that there are no reasons to hurry with retaliatory sanctions against the United States and the European Union though sanctions will be certainly imposed, the diplomat said in an online interview with electronic news edition Gazeta.ru on Tuesday.

“They try to mislead us from the chosen path using unacceptable methods,” he said. “In this situation, we cannot stay indifferent. The shape of response is no less significant than its content in this case.”

“I just want to say that it is also possible sometimes to look at all this from the outside,” Ryabkov said, adding that “It is possible to restrict rhetoric and limit some manifestations of unacceptance. Everything depends from a concrete moment.

“We are quite cool-blooded and are ready to take each turn of the current crisis from some distance, without yielding to passion and a storm in the soul according to the Descartes philosophy. Let these people be on the other side and they cannot put up with what is happening. This is a burden of human passions, as I would describe what is happening in Washington now.”

In reply to a question whether it means that Russia has an already prepared response to the US and the EU, but is waiting for a moment to give it, Ryabkov said: “We not only have it, something is in effect and something will be introduced soon. There is a question as to which concrete symmetrical response will be given and what it will imply,” he said, adding that “Probably, there are no reasons to make haste of it. But it will follow for sure.”

 

Relations with the US and the EU

Russia does not intend to break relations with the United States or European Union, building some unions with Asian countries instead, Sergey Ryabkov said.

“I’m against, in view of my work experience and general convictions, raising the issue in this sense,” the diplomat said. “It would be a wrong choice. It’s not the situation where we should choose either this or that.”

“Unfortunately, Ukraine has been faced with the choice: either Russia or the European Union,” he added. “We have never believed that we should be strictly guided by the horizon, by compass, by some vector on the map. It’s primitive foreign policy. We, on the contrary, have always declared that foreign policy should be multi-vector.”

“It’s a zero-sum game, if we have lost here it means that we will win somewhere else, or, if we have tensions with the West, it means that we must for some reason build some absolutely unthinkable union with China, for example,” Ryabkov stressed. “All this happens differently in nature. And people from all sides are much more intelligent than they seem to be. And it is more difficult to find possibilities for interaction than it appears on the face of it.”

“We don’t want to break anything either with the European Union or the United States,” the Russian deputy foreign minister said. “We have lots of human ties of every kind, families live, people work, the economy depends on them. We at the same time want to develop our Far Eastern regions.” “We have special relations with China, have big prospects with Southeast Asia, certain things have begun to improve with Japan,” the diplomat added. “But all this could be done simultaneously. If something is stalling or there is a setback, well, let’s make efforts to jointly find a solution to this specific problem so that to make up for it afterwards or avoid worsening. But we won’t say: that’s it, we are not friends anymore,” the Russian deputy foreign minister noted.

 

The Geneva statement on Ukraine

There is not a single reliable evidence proving that the Western partners are fulfilling their liabilities under the Geneva statement on Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.

“We have the Geneva statement of April 17,” he told the Gazeta.ru online newspaper. “The questions is to have the Kiev authorities and their sponsors, I would rather say ‘wire-pullers,’ in Washington and in some European capitals strictly follow this statement and fulfill it. They are laying claims to us that we allegedly demonstrate poor work in thus sense, but, as a matter of fact, there is not a single reliable evidence proving that they fulfill the Geneva statement.”

Ryabkov stressed that a key provision of the Geneva statement was the “disarmament of the Right Sector and leaving illegally seized streets and squares across the entire Ukraine.” “We cannot put up with the situation when the entire political pressure and entire criticism are aimed only at protesters in Ukraine’s eastern and southeastern regions as though there is nothing that has forced these people to resort to such an extreme form of expressing their protest,” he said.

“It’s high time to begin organizing of a normal inclusive political process that is to be crowned by a constitutional reform in Ukraine,” he stressed. “This will be the basis for elections, referendums, whatever. It is wrong to just stay in Kiev, agree anything among themselves and at the same time demand that people who no longer can put up with the situation should surrender arms, vacate buildings, return to their homes and live by the rules written by no one knows whom, no one knows how and no one knows on what basis.