MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday he believed his US colleagues were ready to continue dialogue with Moscow on complex issues despite bilateral tensions.

Lavrov, who met US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on the sidelines of an international gathering in Manila, said the first thing that Tillerson asked about was Russia’s retaliation to new US sanctions against Moscow.

“He was primarily interested ... in details of those decisions that we grudgingly made in response to the law on anti-Russian sanctions,” Lavrov said. The meeting was their first since President Donald Trump reluctantly signed into law the sanctions that Russia said amounted to a full-scale trade war and ended hopes for better ties.

“We provided an explanation,” Lavrov said, referring to Russia’s decision to take over a summer-house compound in Moscow leased by the US embassy and an order to slash US diplomatic presence in Russia.

Lavrov said he also cited President Vladimir Putin who, in an interview to Russian TV last week, explained Moscow’s need to retaliate to the US sanctions over its role in the Ukrainian crisis and recently expanded to punish Russia for meddling in the US presidential election.

Lavrov described his talks with Tillerson as lengthy and said they covered a wide range of topics, from the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula to coordination plans between Russia and the United States to withstand attacks.

“We felt the readiness of our US colleagues to continue dialogue. I think there’s no alternative to that,” Lavrov said.

The two sides agreed that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and Under Secretary Thomas A. Shannon would continue discussing complex issues on the bilateral agenda. Speaking on Rossiya24 state TV, Lavrov also said Tillerson told him the United States’ special representative on Ukraine, Kurt Volker, a former US envoy to Nato, would meet a senior aide to Putin, Vladimir Surkov, “in the nearest future”.

Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2017