MOSCOW, March 7 (RIA Novosti) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Washington on Friday against “hasty and reckless” steps over the crisis in Ukraine that could harm Russia-US relations.
In a telephone call initiated by the American side, Lavrov told US Secretary of State John Kerry that any sanctions against Russia “would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang.”
US President Barack Obama on Thursday announced the first set of sanctions against Moscow to punish Russia for perceived violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The sanctions include visa bans and asset freezes against unidentified Russian officials deemed responsible for the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis.
In an hour-long telephone call earlier on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Obama that US-Russian relations “should not be sacrificed due to disagreements over individual, though extremely significant, international problems.”
Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a chat show on state television late Friday that Russia did not want the return of the Cold War that kept the Soviet Union and the West on opposite sides of the barricades for over four decades.
“There still remains hope…that some points of agreement [over the Ukrainian crisis] could be found as a result of dialogue – which our partners, thank God, have not yet rejected,” Peskov said.