MOSCOW, September 5 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman suggested on Thursday that US-Russia relations, currently at their lowest ebb in years, needed a second “reset.”
The two nations’ bilateral ties are going through difficult times, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for the Russian president, said in an interview Thursday with television channel Russia Today.
He added that the current relationship between the two world leaders “is not a desired result” of the original reset, announced in 2009. “Definitely we have to think about a kind of ‘reset’ before we open a new page,” he said.
Peskov claimed that Russia has and will always strive toward a healthy relationship with the United States, adding that the two nations shared responsibility for global and strategic stability and peace-keeping efforts in certain regions of the world.
“We sincerely believe that all this is possible only on the basis of mutual understanding and mutual benefits. If it is single-sided then automatically we’ll have to face difficulties in bilateral relations,” Peskov said.
He stressed that Moscow would continue to try to improve relations with Washington.
Peskov’s comments come six years after US President Barack Obama and Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev announced a bilateral relationship “reset” at the 2009 G20 summit in London.
Though the two countries a year later did reach agreement on a nuclear arms reduction treaty, known as START, they have clashed on a number of other issues since then – most recently the extradition of whistleblower Edward Snowden and the need for military intervention in the Syrian civil war.
