MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th February, 2020) The process of solving the issues of the bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington is stagnating, and it is hard to cooperate with the US colleagues, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
He noted that there had been at least 12 meetings of a group on dealing with problematic issues between the two countries, but without any real successes.
"During those meetings, everything boiled down to a Russian representative listing issues, [and] unacceptable actions by the US administration to his US counterpart ... The US side replied to us that it would look into that, but Russia, you see, had to stop meddling in the US affairs because everything is interconnected. It is the same old story, as they used to say," Lavrov said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper.
The Russian foreign minister added that despite new US Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan pledging to help both countries move forward on certain issues, the prospects of normalization of the relations were unclear.
"We kind of managed to somehow or other restore the dialogue on counter-terrorism last year. In recent years, the Americans have passed to us information that allowed to prevent terror attacks in Russia. We have also been relaying information to them since the time of the Boston Marathon [attack] ... When in October 2019 Washington offered to continue consultations, we agreed to arrange adoption of a joint statement on counter-terrorism for my visit, in order to show a positive signal ... But when I arrived, it turned out they had 'once again failed to agree upon something in time.' It is hard to do specific work with our US partners right now," he said.
On January 30, US State Secretary Mike Pompeo claimed that Washington was trying to find areas of cooperation with Moscow, citing his counter-terrorism work with Russia.
