Russia interested in bringing ties with US back to normal - Lavrov

UN, September 20. /TASS/. Relations between Russia and the United States need to be mended, and Moscow is interested in this, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday after talks with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. "It is clear that we need to fix these ties," he told reporters. "We did not launch this spiral of not-quite-positive reciprocal measures, and we are interested in returning back to the normal state of our bilateral affairs." Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump signed into law a bill toughening US sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea. The bill ‘Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act’ legalized restrictive measures imposed on Russia by the Obama administration. On July 28, Moscow offered Washington to cut down the diplomatic and technical staff at the U.S. embassy and other legations in Russia by September 1 to the level of full parity with the size of the personnel at Russian diplomatic missions in the U.S., or 455 persons in all. On August 31, the US authorities demanded that Moscow closed by September 2 its Consulate General in San Francisco, the trade mission in Washington and its office in New York. Read more