MOSCOW – The new sanctions imposed by the United States against Russia over the situation in Ukraine are a “political gift” to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
“On June 20 Washington announced a new significant expansion of the U.S. sanctions against Russian individuals and legal entities. It is obvious that this is a political gift to Poroshenko who is currently in the U.S.,” Ryabkov said in a commentary on the ministry’s website.
“The sanctions were introduced under the old pretext of events in Ukraine. The foolishness of this motivation is obvious, especially now that Americans have effectively blamed, among others, a Moscow bike center and a well-known catering company for the Ukrainian crisis. The absurdity of this sort of decisions would only be comparable with last year’s placement on the U.S. sanctions lists of the Chaika outdoor pool in Moscow (apparently, at the time the pretext was the pool’s proximity to Crimean Bridge across the river Moskva),” Ryabkov said.
“Washington is bound to understand that such escapades only encourage the party of war in Kyiv, which has long sought to derail the peaceful settlement of the Donbas conflict,” Ryabkov said.
“Also alarming is that the step, taken to please the U.S. internal political conjuncture, continues the trend set by the previous, Obama’s administration, towards ruining the relations between our countries. We regret that the new U.S. administration is kowtowing to seasoned Russophobes from U.S. Congress, who seem to have run out of ideas of how else to harm us and, above all, annul any prospect of ironing out the Russian-U.S. relations,” Ryabkov said.
“Against this backdrop, Washington officials’ words about wanting to continue dialogue with us, to look for common ground and to resolve a number of bilateral and important international problems sound totally unconvincing. In practice, U.S. actions sharply devalue such claims, which we will certainly take into account,” the deputy minister said.
