U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Nikki Haley has said that Russia is not a friend to the U.S. and will not be, based on the values its government portrays.
“[Moscow] is not, will not, be our friend … As long as their government has the values that it has, and as long as it conducts itself the way it does internationally,” Haley said Thursday, as quoted by the CNN broadcaster.
Haley said that she believed Moscow to be involved in the attempts to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling it “an outrageous thing.”
The envoy also claimed that Moscow was backing the Syrian government, protecting Iran from more thorough legal inspections and illegally occupying Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine and a number of Western countries do not recognise the decision of the Crimean residents to rejoin Russia.
More than 90 per cent of the region’s inhabitants voted for the reunification in March 2014, shortly after the new government came to power in Kiev.
According to Haley, the U.S. had sent advanced weapons to Ukraine, carried out successful strikes in Syria and toughened sanctions on Russia.
“Russia hates all of those moves, and most of them did not exist before this administration … And that’s the way it should be, until Russia starts to act like a responsible country,” she said,
Moscow has repeatedly refuted allegations of intervention in the U.S. presidential election, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling them groundless and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointing out that the accusations had never been backed up by any evidence.
