OREANDA-NEWS Bilateral "hotlines" of communication with the United States, created to respond to computer attacks, have become hostages of Washington's Russophobic policy, the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation for international cooperation in the field of information security, Director of the Department of International Information Security (DMIB), said in an interview with RIA Novosti Russian Foreign Ministry Artur Lukmanov.

He recalled that "the use of these communication channels was actually "frozen" back in 2016, when the outgoing administration of Barack Obama, solely for domestic political reasons, invented the myth of Russian interference in the US presidential election."

"Unfortunately, even then it became unprofitable for Washington to maintain contacts with us in the interests of jointly suppressing malicious activity in the digital space," Lyukmanov explained. In his opinion, "the American authorities saw much more dividends in replicating unsubstantiated accusations of our country and other "undesirable regimes" in computer attacks."

"In other words, the issue on which we used to have a constructive dialogue has become, at the instigation of Washington, a hostage to a rabid Russophobic policy," he added.
At the same time, according to him, it is the United States that loses more from this. "We see how the Americans bite their elbows when it is necessary to negotiate with us in the international arena, but they cannot step over the wall they built," Lukmanov said, adding that "in an attempt to isolate Russia, in a sense, they isolated themselves."

"Of course, it is extremely difficult to build a global system of international information security without key players like the United States. Sooner or later, Washington will realize the impossibility of strengthening its own information security without broad international cooperation, including with Russia," the agency's interlocutor stressed.

At the same time, he made a reservation that "we are not going to wait for our overseas colleagues to come to their senses." "We will continue to work calmly in a bilateral format and on multilateral platforms with our foreign partners, who are ready to cooperate on the basis of the principles of sovereign equality of states and non-interference in their internal affairs. We have already built a schedule of such contacts for years to come," he concluded.