Russin Deputy Defense Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Izvestiya TV yesterday that Russia does not regard Washington as a viable partner with which it can negotiate, but that trust must be restored. He told TASS that over the past years the United States had chosen “the path of consistently dismantling various structures and mechanisms which were in the relations between Moscow and Washington.” Lately, the U.S. has sent treaties and agreements into the dustbin of history. “This is a regrettable development,” Ryabkov said. “We don’t view the U.S. as a partner who is able to negotiate. We lost trust in Washington as a contractor and probably, there is the need to start gradually restoring it, and this needs to be done by the tactics of small steps.”
Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke similarly in an interview with Argumenty i Fakty newspaper, addressing directly the New York Times narrative claiming that Russian military intelligence pays bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops. “These are groundless conclusions of journalists that have already been refuted by the White House and the Pentagon,” he said. According to Patrushev, the U.S. has already introduced sanctions against Russia “based on fake news.”
