MOSCOW, October 6. /TASS/. The US has embarked on a deliberate course of ending the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in order to remove all obstacles for containing Russia on the international arena, experts told TASS on Friday.

Deputy head of the Department of European Security at the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations Dmitry Danilov said that after Donald Trump's election as US president, Russia hoped for resolving problems associated with the INF Treaty. "We offered not just to exchange our concerns, and not only on the INF Treaty, but also on such issues as Russia's questions to the US about the situation with missile defense. We also offered to work specifically on addressing those concerns in joint expert groups and commissions, to discuss ways to resolve those concerns, to determine whether they have any grounds," Danilov said.

"The US did not go down this path not because the Trump Administration didn't want to do it. Instead, it was because the internal situation in the US and the position of the Congress toward Trump himself , toward Russia and specifically toward the Treaty, did not presuppose those steps," the expert continued. "The US side has embarked on a course of dismantling the Treaty. In this case, we are not talking about the US attempts to resolve their concerns. On the contrary, they are trying to use their concerns to withdraw from the INF Treaty," he said.

According to an expert from the Center for Security Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences Konstantin Blokhin, US actions "fall in line with the logic of intensifying confrontation in Russian-US relations, which has a systemic nature, especially in the military-technical, economic and informational-psychological sphere."