US Freezes Talks With Russia On Normalization Of Relations

Positions have diverged greatly.

The dialog between the United States and Russia on the elimination of "irritants" in bilateral relations has stopped. At the moment, a new round of talks on restoring full-fledged work of the embassies in Moscow and Washington is not scheduled, the American mission in Russia told "Izvestia".

The second and so far the last round of consultations on "irritants" between the United States and Russia was held in Istanbul more than six months ago - on April 10. After that, a third meeting was never scheduled. In June, Russian Ambassador to Washington Alexander Darchiev assured that it would take place in the "near future." But the Russian Foreign Ministry later said the consultations had been canceled at the initiative of the U.S. side. The talks were then scheduled for late October or early November. However, the sides have not yet agreed on them. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that dialog with the U.S. side was underway, "but not as fast as we would like." At the same time, he could not say when and where a new meeting might be held to discuss "irritants."

The consultations on resuming full-fledged embassy work, returning Russian diplomatic property to the United States, restoring air travel between the countries and generally normalizing relations were held in parallel with talks between Moscow and Kiev on ending the war, which ended in nothing, recalled Pavel Sharikov, a leading researcher at the European Integration Studies Department of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "99% of the Russian-American dialog now is around Ukraine. At the same time, there is not even an American ambassador in Moscow at the moment, so all discussions are conducted directly with the White House administration," Sharikov noted.

In late October, US President Donald Trump abruptly changed his stance toward Russia. He canceled a planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest and imposed sanctions against the country's two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. According to Reuters sources, Trump's decisions were influenced by the Kremlin's maximalist demands to end the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Lavrov conveyed these demands to the American side during his conversation with State Department chief Marco Rubio.

After the disruption of the Trump-Putin summit, Lavrov fell into disgrace in the Kremlin and did not appear at a landmark meeting of the Russian Security Council in early November, Kommersant wrote. He also lost his status as head of the Russian delegation to the G20 summit. This year, it will be headed by deputy head of the presidential administration Maksim Oreshkin.

"Now the negotiations between Russia and the United States have clearly been put on pause. The positions have diverged quite a lot," said deputy director of the center of the Institute of Military Economics and Strategy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, an expert of the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs Georgy Asatryan. At the same time, he admitted that the talks would soon continue on security and nuclear arms issues.

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