Ex-Russian Ambassador Kislyak: Lifting US sanctions on Russia "difficult"

MOSCOW - 5 August 2017: Now-retired Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak said that the main topic of his conversation with former US National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was counter-terrorism, Russia Today reported.

The talks were transparent and never touched upon sanctions, he added.

“I do not comment on our daily contacts with our colleagues. Secondly, I had instructions not to discuss sanctions. We never discussed sanctions with anybody. And I assure you, I have honestly followed the instructions,” Kislyak told Rossiya-24.

“Sanctions aren’t our thing,” the retired diplomat said. “We don’t discuss or bargain about sanctions, because we believe they were implemented in an illegal, politically aggressive way to begin with.”

While it would be difficult to lift the newly-imposed restrictive measures, Kislyak does not believe the US and Russia are back to the Cold War.

“No, it’s not the Cold War,” he said. “The problem in our relations, as I have tried to say, is in the sense of absolute exceptionalism of the Americans and their purported right to tell everyone else what is good and what is bad.”

The former Russian envoy to Washington blasted the sanctions, which he believes are aimed at impeding normal economic cooperation between Russia and the US.

“The economic sanctions, which we have been lately discussing a lot, were designed so that it will be very difficult to cancel them under the current conditions in America,” Kislyak said.

“The whole mechanism is made so that the US law would not give the opportunity to develop normality in economic relations with our country,” he added.