Russia warns of ‘painful’ response if Trump backs new US sanctions

Bloomberg

Russia threatened to retaliate against new sanctions passed by the US House of Representatives, saying they made it all but impossible to achieve the Trump administration’s goal of improved relations.
The measures push US-Russia ties into uncharted territory and “don’t leave room for the normalization of relations” in the foreseeable future, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday, according to the Interfax news service.
Hope “is dying” for improved relations because the scale of “the anti-Russian consensus in Congress makes dialogue impossible and for a long time,” Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the international affairs committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said on Facebook. Russia should prepare a response to the sanctions that’s “painful for the Americans,” he said.
The bill passed by a vote of 419-3 on Tuesday strengthens sanctions against Russia less than three weeks after President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin held their first official meeting at the Group of 20 summit. The measure, which now goes to the Senate, requires Trump to seek congressional approval before easing sanctions imposed under the Obama administration for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections and its support for separatists in Ukraine. The White House has sent mixed signals about whether Trump will sign the bill.
Trump will sign the law because “he’s a prisoner of Congress and anti-Russian hysteria,” Alexei Pushkov, a senator in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said on Twitter. The sanctions are “a new stage of confrontation,” he said.
McDonald’s restaurants in Russia aren’t “a sacred cow” and should face “sanitary sanctions,” Pushkov said in a separate tweet. The fast food chain’s press office in Russia declined to comment immediately. The largest McDonald’s in Russia was shuttered for three months in 2014 amid about 250 safety probes of the company’s restaurants by officials after the US imposed sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Putin defies Trump on Korea ties amid missile threat
Bloomberg

In retrospect, said Vladimir Bogdanov, it wasn’t the best time to start the first passenger-ship service between Russia and North Korea shortly before Kim Jong Un shocked the world by announcing he’s successfully tested a missile capable of striking the US mainland.
“We were in a hurry, thinking we’d be too late. We should have slowed down,” said Bogdanov, who’s organized nine trips since May between Russia’s far east port of Vladivostok and Rajin in North Korea’s Rason special economic zone. “Still, there’s no turning back” for the service, which is loss-making so far after filling at best a quarter of its 193 places each time, he said.
Economic ties between Russia and North Korea, which share a narrow land border, are similarly beleagured, with trade down for a third year to just $77 million in 2016, according to the Russian customs service. While the volume is small, it’s becoming a point of tension between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump, who’s pressing Russia and other powers to ramp up opposition to the Communist regime’s nuclear-missile program. Russia regards the trade relationship as a means to safeguard its position with Kim in diplomacy to try to defuse the crisis on the Korean peninsula.