U.S. ambassador to Russia: Maintaining sanctions has bipartisan support in Congress

"This issue, in the United States Senate, has united almost 100 percent of Republicans and Democrats," U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said in an interview with RFE/RL’s Russian Service.

As the ambassador noted, maintaining sanctions against Russia is one of the few matters on which both major U.S. political parties agree.

In addition to Crimea and the Donbas conflict, Huntsman cited the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

And he cited the case of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose 2009 death in a Russian prison led to the passage of a U.S. law that has infuriated the Kremlin.

"People uniformly in Congress feel very strongly about these issues and how we should respond,” he said.

The U.S. ambassador to Russia said Washington was committed to defending Ukraine's territorial integrity, saying the issue of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine was "a core part of our estrangement with Russia."

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