MOSCOW (TASS) — Moscow is not going to contact Joseph Biden’s team before the official results of the U.S. presidential election are announced, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Russian TASS news agency on Tuesday.

“We do not contact Biden’s team and we are not going to do so. We need at the very least to wait for the official results of the US presidential election, wait for the inauguration on January 20, and then we’ll see. We don’t want some maliciously inclined individuals and there are many of them in Washington to look for reasons for some sort of endless absolutely groundless accusations directed at us”, the senior diplomat said. “So we will simply wait, there is plenty of time, no rush”, he noted.

Meanwhile, the new Biden-led administration would try to increase effectiveness of sanctions against Russia in a bid to iron out some issues, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering said. Speaking at an online seminar held by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Pickering predicted that probably the Biden administration would seek to do more to unite allies for the sake of stepping up sanctions.

Another issue is whether the Biden administration’s efforts would be a success, Pickering said, noting that this was a challenging task.

Pickering, who headed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1993-1996, admitted that the current sanctions against Russia were not working. “Let me begin with a very quick conclusion. In general, sanctions ain’t work with Russia. It’s a huge country, great resilience, lots of resources.” According to him, Russia has “a weak economy” compared with other leading industrially developed states, but even this factor has not made sanctions policy against Moscow successful.