MOSCOW (Sputnik) — He underlined that at the same time there are no guarantees that US President-elect Donald Trump will be a "comfortable" counterpart for Moscow regarding the issue.
"Anti-terrorism activities were and would continue to be one of the most top-priority spheres of our cooperation with the United States… At the same time a long-time period of cooling in bilateral relations has surely had an impact on this specific sphere and it cannot end in a moment … Regardless the pace of developments after the [US] administration is changed, our countries should make significant efforts to restore trust ant to find compromise solutions in the sphere of counterterrorism," Ilya Rogachev told RIA Novosti in an interview.
He added that Moscow cannot be sure that Trump is a "comfortable" US president for Russia, but several statements of the president-elect, particularly about a joint fight against the Daesh, an extremist group outlawed in both Russia and the United States, had been welcomed in Moscow.
Nevertheless, according to Rogachev, Trump’s victory brings cautious hope that the anti-Russia policy of the incumbent US presidential administration will be corrected and the two states would cooperate on a number of counterterrorism issues without double standards.
“Will the Trump’s team, after it takes offices in Washington, be able to overcome a habit of the US political establishment to ‘look down its nose’ at Russia? Would they do it? If it happens, if the line to contain Russia is changed by the perception of us as equal partners with our own system of values and national interests that should be respected, a good basis for normalization of dialogue and anti-terror cooperation would emerge,” Ilya Rogachev told RIA Novosti in an interview.
