The United States’ attempts to isolate Russia or turn it into a “regional power” are doomed to fail, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Italy’s Limes magazine on February 4, 2016.

“Today, it can be said confidently that attempts to form a unipolar model of the world order have failed,” he said. “Only collective efforts on a solid basis of international law can ensure sustainable global development and make certain that present-day threats are effectively countered.”

“It looks like Washington has not yet realized that there is no alternative to such behavior in international affairs,” the Russian Foreign Minister noted. “Washington prefers America’s “exclusiveness” to the objective tendency of forming a multi-polar world and is seeking to preserve vestiges of global supremacy. Hence, it tends to take unilateral actions and punish those countries that disagree with the United States.”

In the meantime, Russia has always invited the Americans to “develop bilateral relations on a fair partnership basis, without compulsion.” Lavrov said. “When the United States opted to scale down cooperation, it embarked on this path long before the Ukrainian crisis, which the American leaders tend to picture as a pretext for such actions. We warned that this policy is a road to nowhere.”

“Washington seems to understand now that it is literally impossible to isolate Russia or confine its influence to the regional level,” he said. “It looks quite logical in this context that along with the aggressive rhetoric, the Obama administration has never interrupted the dialogue with us on a wide range of key problems today. Notably, it was the initiator of such dialogue and has asked us for support on many issues.”