Do the USA and Russia have further cooperation opportunities?

James Collins, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1997-2001, and now an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, in the interview given to the Russian department of the “Voice of America” spoke about the visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Russia calling it a witness of changing relations between RF and USA, but the prospective of the relations keeps staying fragile.

Today the USA Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a working visit has arrived to Moscow, the capital of Russia.

“I don’t think there’s any question that Iran will be on the agenda. I think we have made substantial progress in looking for common approaches to Iran”, - assured the former ambassador.

“Where we seem to part company often, or where the debate gets difficult, is in what do you do if the Iranian side refuses to cooperate and this gets into sanctions debates and so forth. I believe the Russians see sanctions differently from us. They have very great doubts that they will be effective. As we saw in New York, President Medvedev said he doubted their effectiveness, but that maybe they would be inevitable. I’m not quite sure what to make of that statement. I believe we should not overestimate how far it carries the Russians in our direction”.

To the question of the journalist “What does the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Russia? Are there opportunities for further cooperation? And continuing tension?” the ambassador answered: “We have a lot of unfinished business, I would say, in the sense of developing a more stable set of future relations, both between us and more broadly in the region, regarding, in essence, the post-Soviet space. The aftermath of the Georgian war is still with us. There are disagreements that are very sharp about Russia’s action in recognizing these two territories that we recognize as a part of Georgia. So we have that issue, there are the other unresolved conflicts in the region like Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria, and there is broadly-speaking, an unresolved set of issues which are very complex and very large over the future of what kinds of arrangements will exist going forward to set-up the future European security system”.