The Foreign Ministry named the reason for stopping the cyber dialogue between Russia and the United States

MOSCOW, January 5Bilateral “hot lines” of communication with the United States, created to respond to computer attacks, have become hostages of Washington’s Russophobic policies, said Artur Lyukmanov, the special representative of the Russian President for international cooperation in the field of information security, director of the Department of International Information Security (DIS) of the Russian Foreign Ministry, in an interview.
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 activities in the digital space,” Lyukmanov explained. In his opinion, “the American authorities saw much more dividends in the circulation of unsubstantiated accusations of our country and other “undesirable regimes” in computer attacks.”

“In other words, the issue on which we previously had a constructive dialogue has become, at Washington’s instigation, hostage to rabid Russophobic policies,” he added.
At the same time, according to him, it is the United States that loses the most 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 have erected,” Lyukmanov said, adding that “in an attempt to isolate Russia, in a sense, they isolated themselves.”
«Of course, building a global system of international information security without key players like the United States is extremely difficult. Washington will sooner or later realize the impossibility of strengthening its own information security without broad international cooperation, including with Russia,» the agency's interlocutor emphasized .
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 calmly work in a bilateral format and on multilateral platforms with our foreign partners who are ready to interact 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.