MOSCOW. May 17 (Interfax) - There is currently no communication between Russia and the United States at the foreign minister level; there are only contacts between the presidential administrations regarding U.S. citizens detained in Russia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
"We are not communicating at the ministerial level. Washington [the White House] sometimes calls Yury Ushakov, the advisor to the Russian president, and delivers the same message - 'free Paul Whelan', and now also 'journalist' Evan Gershkovich (this is what they call him)," Lavrov said.
There is another topic of Russian-American contacts, which is the working conditions of Russian diplomats in the United States and American diplomats in Russia, Lavrov said. "More or less the same issues sometimes pop up in our contacts with European countries," he said in an interview with the Tsargrad television channel.