US State Department: IS and Russia are not the same threats for us

Islamic State in the Middle East and Russia in the Ukrainian conflict are "completely different problems that cannot be compared," US State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said, speaking at a briefing answering a question about how it could happen that the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Stengel in a letter to the head of Sony Pictures Entertainment Michael Lynton, listing the challenges which the United States is facing in foreign policy, put IS in the Middle East confrontation and Russia in the Ukrainian conflict in one row.

"These are two very different things. There is no way we are trying to compare them," the State Department spokesperson said.

The inconvenient situation for the State Department arose after the publication of correspondence between Stengel and Linton on the WikiLeaks site, which proves the efforts of the US foreign policy department to connect representatives of the largest corporations in the field of film and entertainment to the propaganda war on the international scene, RIA Novosti reported.

As can be seen from the correspondence, Linton evaded further discussion of this topic, the agency said.

When Harf quoted the text of the Stengel letter, she noted that "it can be explained by the peculiarities of the short style of e-mail."