WASHINGTON, September 29. /ITAR-TASS/. US President Barack Obama said on Sunday his relationship with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin is business-like.

“I’ve always had a business-like relationship with him and it’s blunt and it’s firm,” the president said in a Sunday interview with CBS television.

Speaking about Russia, the president called it “a great country with incredible talent and incredible traditions”. “And if you focus on your engineering talent and your mathematical talents and growing your economy, then by definition, Russia’s going to be a great power in this world,” he said.

Reset in Russia-US relations unlikely

A new reset in the Russian-US relations looks highly improbable now that the United States administration has “mounted a horse of Cold War”, Alexey Pushkov, the chairman of the International Committee of the Russian State Duma, said on Sunday.

“Reset-2 that could straighten out relations between Russia and the United States is now highly improbable, since the Obama Administration has firmly mounted a horse of Cold War. This is not our choice,” Pushkov wrote on his Twitter microblog.

Strained relations

Over the recent months, relations between Russia and the United States have strained over the Ukrainian crisis.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in his interview with the television Channel Five that Russia was interested in the normalization of relations with the United States. “We are absolutely interested in the normalization of these relations but it was not us that wrecked them,” Lavrov noted.

“And now we need what the Americans might call a “reset”, a term coined under the President Obama Administration after a serious backtracking in our relations in the final years of the George W. Bush administration. Today, the current administration is demolishing cooperation structures it has built together with us. Maybe, something else will be invented: either reset No2 or reset 2.0," the foreign minister said.

Russia did not aggravate relations with the US either in the Magnitsky or Snowden situation, but did its best to keep the channels of communication, Lavrov said on Friday, September 26, in a press conference. Russia is ready for honest and equitable work with the United States and others, he added.