Russia and the United States are making "slow progress" in cybersecurity talks, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Thursday.
"As far as I know, it can be put in a couple of words: slow progress," he said, commenting on the situation. "But it is good because there was no special formalized channel on this topic before the meeting of the presidents [Vladimir Putin of Russia and Joe Biden of the United States] in Geneva."
"The United States kept on piling up claims and the US-fanned situations happened quite regularly. These were aggravating factors," he added.
The Russian diplomat recalled that after the two countries’ presidents had agreed that cybersecurity issues required serious attention the countries set up corresponding teams, which maintained direct contacts.
"We used to say and keep on saying that this dialogue should cover a wide range of topics and not be reduced to the topic of ransomware attacks the Americans keep on speaking about. We don’t underestimate this topic and address it too. But specialists should have the possibility to speak about other serious, alarming issues, including, for example, such things as the use of the internet and information and communications technologies to impair systems used in Russia to back the elections. But in general, there are a lot of questions on critical infrastructure as well," Ryabkov added.
