DAVOS, Switzerland, January 17. /TASS/. U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump has big respect for the Russian people and Russian culture and he is signaling that whatever the current hostilities may be, there is a hope the two countries can improve the situation in the coming years, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s senior advisor for communications with business told TASS.

"What the new American president is saying is that he has an enormous respect for the Russian people and the legacy of the relationship that the US has with Russia, which dates back to the Second World War," Scaramucci said. "We were two nations in the heat of battle during the Cold War, yet there was enough mutuality of respect that we kept all of our citizens safe during that period of time."

"So I think he has a perspective, a stock of perspective, he’s a man of tremendous common sense and I think his position, his belief is there’s probably shared values or shared interests, that we can align ourselves with each other and this could be mutually beneficial," he said.

"At the same time, there may be antagonisms that either we have to fix," Scaramucci said. "Or we can still stay antagonistic with each other, but he [Trump] is a realist."

"He has enormous respect for the Russian people and Russian culture and so he is signaling that, hopefully, whatever the hostilities may be, perhaps we can improve them over the coming years," the advisor said. 

US sanctions 

Scaramucci said he believes the American sanctions against Russia have had an opposite effect and have rather consolidated the Russians around their president.

"You know the Russian people better than me," he said. "I think the sanctions had in some ways an opposite effect because of Russian culture. I think the Russians would eat snow if they had to. And so for me the sanctions probably galvanized the nation with the nation's president."

"Long-term sanctions could be painful had they been effective in other areas? In other nations the answer is yes, or otherwise they wouldn't be using them if they weren't effective, but what I think we have to do now is think outside the box."

"We have to make the world safer, we have to eliminate from the world the threat of radical Islamist terrorism, and we have to figure out the ways to grow the wages for working-class families," Scaramucci said.

"Whether in Russia or in the US, I think there're a lot of common objectives," he indicated.

Scaramucci said some actions taken by the Russian government had been "met with some level of disapproval by the global community", but he added that "may be there will be an opportunity to sit down again" and to see if the sides could negotiate some of the things again.

President-elect is an 'optimist by nature'

Donald Trump sees enough common interests, proceeding from which the US and Russia could improve their relations, Scaramucci has noted.

"I’m an optimistic person by nature and so is the president-elect," Scaramucci said when a reporters asked him if he thought if mutual understanding between the two countries could be better, especially in the economic segment.

"I think the president-elect has the vision to see enough common interests where, hopefully, in a year from now the relationship with the Russian people and the Russian government and the United States will be better than it is today. That’s our hope."

He said there could not no certainty about that "because who knows what circumstances or facts are gonna contribute to the relationship but we would like that to be the case, so I’m an optimist and I’d like to say yes."

Scaramucci also specified the kind of message he was going to make on behalf of the incoming Administration at Davos.

"I think it’s a fairly consistent basic message, which is that more economic commerce we have as a globe, the better the societies will be," he said. "I think we’re very focused - at least on the Administration’s side - on how we’re going to get middle class wages and working class families’ wages up in the US, but I think one of the ways we can do this is through the symmetry of trade agreements."

"You know we are for free trade but we want trade to be fair, we don’t want it to be unbalanced against the US anymore," Scaramucci said. "We’re big-time believers that more growth, more opportunity comes from trade, from commerce and we have no objections to the American multinationals investing anywhere in the world."