MOSCOW: Moscow called yesterday for a new “reset 2.0” in relations with Washington, saying the situation in Ukraine that had led to Western sanctions against Russia was improving thanks to Kremlin peace initiatives.
Washington and Brussels accuse Moscow of supporting a pro-Russian rebellion in east Ukraine and have imposed sanctions, which they have repeatedly tightened since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March.
The conflict has brought relations between Moscow and the West to their lowest level since the end of the Cold War. US President Barack Obama said last week that the sanctions could be lifted if Russia takes the path of peace and diplomacy.
In television interviews, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was time to repeat the “reset”, a word Washington used to describe an attempt to mend ties early in Obama’s presidency.
But he also lashed out at Nato’s “Cold War mentality”, criticised Washington for excluding Russia’s ally Bashar Al Assad from its campaign against Islamic State fighters in Syria, and said Washington “can no longer act as the prosecutor, the judge, and the executioner in every part of the world”.
“We are absolutely interested in bringing the ties to normal but it was not us who destroyed them. Now they require what the American would probably call a ‘reset’,” Lavrov said, according to a transcript of one interview on his ministry’s website.
“The current US administration is destroying today much of the cooperation structure that it created itself along with us. Most likely, something more will come up — a reset No. 2 or a reset 2.0,” he told Russia’s Channel 5 television.
Shortly after Obama took office in 2009, his then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton presented Lavrov with a red “reset” button intended to signal a fresh start to relations that had been strained under Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush. In a diplomatic gaffe much mocked at the time, the button bore a Russian label that said “overload” instead of “reset”; the two words are similar in Russian.
Lavrov said that thanks to “initiatives of the Russian President”, the situation was improving on the ground in Ukraine, where a ceasefire has been in place for several weeks. The September 5 truce is largely holding though some fighting has continued in places including the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.
“The ceasefire is taking shape, though of course not without problems. Monitoring mechanisms have been introduced, talks between Russia, the European Union and Ukraine have started, gas talks have restarted,” Lavrov said.
Western countries say thousands of Russian troops have fought in Ukraine and accuse Moscow of sending weapons, including a surface-to-air missile used to shoot down a Malaysian airliner over rebel-held territory in July. Moscow denies participating in the conflict or arming the rebels.
Speaking to Russia’s state-funded international broadcaster, RT, Lavrov said “NATO still has the Cold War mentality”, and Moscow needed to modernise its conventional and nuclear arms, though he denied this would lead to “a new arms race”. Reuters
