MOSCOW: The Kremlin on Wednesday said Washington was not yet ready to remove barriers to the work of their respective embassies, as efforts to normalise relations between the two countries stall.
Russia and the United States sought to reset diplomatic and business ties after Donald Trump returned to the White House promising a swift end to the conflict in Ukraine, but the US leader became annoyed with both sides after no quick ceasefire was reached.
“Despite some progress, the American side is not yet ready to seriously address the difficulties hampering the embassies’ work,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told journalists at a briefing, AFP reported.
Both sides have been operating their embassies with skeleton staff for years due to diplomatic expulsions.
Moscow and Washington held two meetings in a bid to restore their fractured diplomatic ties, but neither resulted in a breakthrough.
Earlier in June, Russia’s foreign ministry said Washington had cancelled a third round of diplomatic talks with Moscow and that it hoped the pause would not “last for too long”.
Russia blamed a venue dispute for the cancellation of a planned third round of talks with the US last week, which officials in Moscow previously said would be focused on restoring the operations of each side’s diplomatic missions.
“There was an agreement to meet at a specific location. For certain reasons, that location didn’t suit [US officials],” Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporter Pavel Zarubin in the weekly television news program “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin,” which aired on Sunday.
Russia’s new ambassador to the United States, Alexander Darchiev, said earlier this month that a third round of embassy talks would be held in Moscow, claiming the sides had agreed to alternate between Moscow and Washington for future negotiations.
Officials from both countries met on February 27 and April 10 in Istanbul, following a February meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia.
The February meeting marked the first direct talks between Russian and US officials since the start of the Ukraine war.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with Politico on Wednesday that Trump will resist European pressure to escalate sanctions on Russia, arguing that doing so could close the door to potential peace negotiations with Moscow.
Speaking with Politico on the sidelines of the NATO summit in The Hague, Rubio said Trump wants to keep open a diplomatic channel with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“If we did what everybody here wants us to do, and that is come in and crush them with more sanctions, we probably lose our ability to talk to them about the ceasefire and then who’s talking to them?” Rubio said.
Previously, Trump said he had refrained from imposing new sanctions on Russia because he believed a peace deal with Moscow might be within reach, warning he did not want to jeopardize negotiations by acting prematurely.
Speaking after two rounds of peace talks in Istanbul between Moscow and Kyiv that led to no ceasefire, Trump on June 5 declined to say when additional sanctions on Russia might be imposed, only noting there is a deadline “in (his) brain.”
