VIENNA, November 7 (RIA Novosti) — Results of recent elections to the US Congress show that there is no reason to believe that relations between Russia and the United States will improve in the near future, Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov told RIA Novosti on Thursday.
“The fact that there is further polarization between the executive and legislative governments in the Unites States is not helping to solve the huge amount of problems existing in our relations. The administration is bound by and large from the side of maneuvers in the foreign policy, and Congress will, possibly, in a greater degree be concerned with the interparty struggle. We should not wait for the break-though and changes to the better in Russian-US relations. The results of the past elections do not add any optimism in this sense,” Ryabkov said.
On Tuesday, Republicans took control of the US Congress by gaining the majority of seats in the Senate, and retaining the majority in the House of Representatives during the 2014 midterm elections. Congress has become Republican-led for the first time in eight years.
The midterm elections are held in the middle of each president's four-year term. American decided who would fill all 435 seats of the House of Representatives and 36 of the 100 seats in the Senate.
The relations between Russia and the United States have deteriorated amid Ukrainian crisis, as Washington kept blaming Moscow for meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs. Moscow in its turn has repeatedly denied any involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.
Over the past few months, the US has introduced several rounds of economic sanctions against Russia, and persuaded its allies to add Russian companies and individuals to their own blacklists.
