New quality of US-Russian relations does not exclude differences of approaches

New quality of relations between Russia and the United States does not exclude differences of interests and approaches, announced Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov speaking during a roundtable dedicated the 70th anniversary of reestablishing of diplomatic relations between Russia and the USA held on Saturday in Moscow.

According to the minister, at present, the bilateral relations have reached the level of "trusting and mutually beneficial partnership." He said that such partnership is based on the principles of respecting the interests of both countries, openness, predictability, and readiness to search for reasonable compromises.

"The priorities of our cooperation with the United States are well-known. Those are, primarily, a joint fight against new challenges and threats, strengthening of strategic stability and non-proliferation, and settlement of international conflicts," the Russian Foreign Minister underlined. He also stressed that the key task is to provide a solid foundation of trade, economic and investment cooperation to the political relations between the two countries.

"The process of creating new-quality relations does not mean and immediate and complete elimination of problems," Mr. Ivanov underlined. He said "the existence of problems is a natural phenomenon, taking into account our differences of interests and approaches to certain global problems." In his opinion, the goal is to make the work of mechanisms, designed to overcome existing differences without harming the bilateral relations, efficient. "Certainly, we need to protect these mechanisms from negative influence of immediate, situational factors," the Russian minister pointed out. He said that in this respect Russia and the USA had managed to create a certain margin of safety, in general." The participants in the roundtable from the American side include former US Ambassadors in Moscow Jack Matlock, Tom Pickering, Jim Collins, and the current US Ambassador to the Russian Federation Alexander Vershbow. The Russian side is represented by former Soviet and Russian Ambassadors in the United States Yuri Dubinin, Alexander Bessmertnykh, Victor Komplektov, Vladimir Lukin and Yuly Vorontsov.