A senior Russian legislator has described the current state of affairs in Russian-US relations as a rerun of the Cold War.
“The way I see it, it would be appropriate to describe these relations as another edition of the Cold War,” Alexey Pushkov, chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, said in Monday’s parliamentary hearings.
“The more so, since a far higher emotional strain is a characteristic feature of the current situation, and that strain, to my mind, is greater than it was during the Cold War years,” he said.
Pushkov pointed to the complete freeze in inter-parliamentary ties between the two countries. “I can confirm that inter-parliamentary contacts are totally absent,” he said.
“Back six months ago, when we proposed a trip for a discussion of the Syrian crisis, the US Congress in fact declared that it was not interested in cooperation with Russia,” Pushkov recalled. “The casual meetings that have been taking place — on the sidelines of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) or elsewhere — do not change the situation,” Pushkov said.