Russia is ready for a dialogue with the United States, but only on an equal and mutual basis, for which Washington shows no willingness, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zajárova said on Saturday.
“We are not avoiding dialogue and we are ready to negotiate, but strictly on an equal footing, but the signs in Washington are not visible even with a magnifying glass,” he specified.
According to Zakharova, “in the face of hypocritical arguments about the need to maintain a diplomatic presence,” the United States is doing everything possible to further complicate the functioning of Russian agencies.
The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry again urged Washington to think about the consequences.
Zakharova made a timeline of the White House’s aggressive actions against the Russian diplomatic presence, stating that US representatives at various levels are trying to absolve themselves of responsibility for the state of relations between Moscow and Washington.
“Apparently, it is considered normal in Washington to expel Russian diplomats for fictitious reasons, take other people’s property and, in short, steal it, shut down our diplomatic missions, and then hypocritically wonder why the “bold Russians” pay the same currency, damaging US diplomatic missions in Russia.
It is time for Washington to learn that any hostile step will be followed by a reaction that will be painful in any case, Zakharova stressed.
In this context, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed on Friday that the West does not hide that its current political objectives are “to strangle and destroy the Russian economy and Russia as a whole”, within the framework of its efforts to establish a “unipolar world”.
Likewise, he pointed out that his intimidation, accompanied by an unprecedented wave of sanctions, has revealed that the values that this block “constantly preaches”, such as freedom of expression, the market economy and the presumption of innocence, “are not worth nothing”.
The head of Russian diplomacy emphasized that “total war” was a term “used by Hitler’s Germany” and “is now expressed by many European politicians when they talk about what they want to do with the Russian Federation.”
