Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a lengthy interview yesterday to Dmitry Kiselev, the Director General of the government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya, in which he reviewed many aspects of Russian foreign policy, focusing in on the dangerous state of U.S.-Russian affairs. He repeated President Putin’s warning from his April 21 Federal Assembly speech: “We will harshly respond to any attempts to cross the red line, which we ourselves will determine.” Asked by Kiselev if matters today are not worse than they were during the Cold War, and how Russia will respond if provocations continue from the West, Lavrov stated:
“This means that we will be living in conditions of a Cold War, or even worse, as you have already mentioned. In my opinion, tension did run high during the Cold War and there were numerous high-risk conflict situations, but there was also mutual respect. I believe that this is lacking now.”