Putin Must Expect that the New U.S Congress Will Be Tougher

Russlands primære mål er å øke graden av nasjonal kontroll i Arktis, konkluderte den norske etterretningstjenesten med da de tidligere i år la frem Fokus 2017. Her Russlands president Vladimir Putin. (Foto: Presidential Press and Information Office/Kremlin.ru)
- The new Congress is going to be tougher on Russia than the old one, says Patrick Buchanan, a former Senior Advisor to three U.S Presidents, to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

- The new Congress is going to be tougher on Russia than the old one, says Patrick Buchanan, a former Senior Advisor to three U.S Presidents, to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

On Tuesday, Republicans took control of the full Congress by gaining the majority of seats in the US Senate, and retaining the majority in the House of Representatives during the 2014 midterm elections.

Buchanan, who served as a Senior Advisor to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, also sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996.



- Dont want to promote any kind of war

Yesterday he told the Russian news agency that the recently elected US Congress will act more harshly towards Russia, and that he thinks arming Ukraine would be a wrong decision.

- I agree with the president's decision not to arm Ukraine because we don't want to promote any kind of war there, we'd like it to resolve itself peacefully, he says.

Senator John McCain, who is calling on military support for Ukraine, is expected to become Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee due to his seniority.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, tells RIA Novosti that the results of the recent elections show that there is no reason to believe that the relationship between the United States and Russia will improve in the near future.



- Further polarization

- 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 breakthrough 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 yesterday.

The relationship between the two countries have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis. Over the last months EU and the United States and its allies have introduced several rounds of economic sanctions against Russia. Moscow responded by implementing a one-year ban on certain food imports.

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