DO THE USA AND RUSSIA HAVE FURTHER COOPERATION OPPORTUNITIES?
Aysor.am
Tuesday, October 13
James Collins, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1997-2001, and now
an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in
Washington, in the interview given to the Russian department of the
"Voice of America" spoke about the visit of US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to Russia calling it a witness of changing relations
between RF and USA, but the prospective of the relations keeps
staying fragile.
Today the USA Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a working visit
has arrived to Moscow, the capital of Russia.
"I don’t think there’s any question that Iran will be on the
agenda. I think we have made substantial progress in looking for
common approaches to Iran", – assured the former ambassador.
"Where we seem to part company often, or where the debate gets
difficult, is in what do you do if the Iranian side refuses to
cooperate and this gets into sanctions debates and so forth. I believe
the Russians see sanctions differently from us. They have very great
doubts that they will be effective. As we saw in New York, President
Medvedev said he doubted their effectiveness, but that maybe they would
be inevitable. I’m not quite sure what to make of that statement. I
believe we should not overestimate how far it carries the Russians
in our direction".
To the question of the journalist "What does the US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to Russia? Are there opportunities for further
cooperation? And continuing tension?" the ambassador answered:
"We have a lot of unfinished business, I would say, in the sense of
developing a more stable set of future relations, both between us and
more broadly in the region, regarding, in essence, the post-Soviet
space. The aftermath of the Georgian war is still with us. There
are disagreements that are very sharp about Russia’s action in
recognizing these two territories that we recognize as a part of
Georgia. So we have that issue, there are the other unr in the region
like Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria, and there is broadly-speaking,
an unresolved set of issues which are very complex and very large over
the future of what kinds of arrangements will exist going forward to
set-up the future European security system".