Relations between Moscow and Washington are “practically non-existent,” which is bad not only for both countries, but for the world, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said, adding that he sees little prospect for improvement anytime soon.
US President Donald Trump’s administration should offer some incentives to North Korea to move forward toward denuclearization, Nebenzia said on Friday last week in a wide-ranging interview with a small group of reporters at Russia’s UN mission.
The situation “is stalemated at the moment,” he said.
Russia and China have backed an easing of sanctions to spur momentum, but the US insists that North Korea must first make major steps toward eliminating its nuclear program.
“I’m concerned that it doesn’t roll back” to the 2017 era of increasing nuclear and missile tests and escalating rhetoric,” Nebenzia said. “I think that the US hopefully is starting to understand that the situation may go [back].”
As for Iran, Nebenzia said he worries about US strategy if its sanctions do not bring about the changes in behavior the Trump administration wants.
Nebenzia sees “a danger if they go to the limits.”
“I’m worried if anybody wants to go to war with Iran, and that is the enigma and the question — what is the strategy about Iran?” he asked.
He said the US and Russia need to talk about global issues, including strategic stability, terrorism, narcotics and regional conflicts, and he thinks Trump “understands pretty well that it’s better to cooperate.”
However, he said because Russia has become a major issue in US domestic politics — accused of hacking and interfering in the 2016 US elections — “and given the vulnerabilities that drift around this administration, I don’t see too bright prospects for improving [relations] any time soon.”
Looking more broadly at the US position in the world under Trump, whose overarching policy is “America First,” Nebenzia said he does not see the US retreating.
It is that the balance of power in the world is changing “and we definitely witness the rise in a multipolar world” where other centers of power not only Russia and China, but India, Brazil and Africa “all want to be a part of the world governance and they want their voice to be heard and their interests taken into account,” he said.
Nebenzia echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view that Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of Syria was a good move, although he expressed skepticism about whether the announcement would become a reality.
A pullout “will be helpful and conducive to the eventual Syrian settlement” of the seven-year conflict, he said.
If and when the US leaves Syria, the US’ Kurdish allies in the northeast should reintegrate into Syrian society, and “their rights and interests should be taken into account in the final settlement,” he said.
Alluding to fears that Turkish forces could cross the border and go after the US-allied Kurdish fighters, Nebenzia added: “I think that’s the best antidote for them against any possible bad developments that might take place.”
Nebenzia said the greatest threat in today’s world is not Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as the US national security strategy claims, but terrorism — and what is needed most is “a true coalition to fight international terrorism.”
Responding to questions about Trump’s decision to cut the US force in Afghanistan in half, Nebenzia said: “Afghanistan is one country that demonstrated to the whole world that it’s impossible to defeat.”
“That was demonstrated by the British. That was demonstrated by the Soviets and now it’s the turn of the Americans,” he said.
It “looks like there’s no military solution and the understanding of that is gaining momentum,” he said.
The government and the Taliban will have to talk to each other, he said, adding that “the Taliban is part of Afghan society — you can’t write them off.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS