Just weeks after a summit meeting intended to show a thawing in relations between the United States and Russia, Vice President Joe Biden made blistering criticisms of Russia's failing economy, loss of face and a leadership that is 'clinging to something in the past' in an interview published Saturday. Speaking on the heels of his trip to Georgia and Ukraine, Biden said flatly that the Obama administration would make no deals and accept no compromises with the Kremlin in exchange for better relations. Russia itself, he said, should find it in its own interest to repair relations. The Kremlin immediately responded to the comments, made in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, with a demand for a clarification of the administration's intentions toward Russia, saying essentially that it was receiving a mixed message so soon after President Barack Obama had visited Moscow for the summit meeting. Calling the criticism 'perplexing' in light of the diplomatic overtures initiated by the United States and described as 'pressing the reset button,' the chief foreign policy adviser to President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Interfax news agency, 'The question is: who is shaping the U.S. foreign policy, the president or respectable members of his team?' The adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, said the atmosphere between the countries had improved since Obama's visit early this month. 'If some members of Obama's team and government do not like this atmosphere, why don't they say so?' Interfax reported him as saying. 'If they disagree with the course of their president, we just need to know this.' In the interview, Biden set aside diplomatic finesse and offered an unflinching analysis of the current state of affairs in Russia. Beset by falling oil prices, with a corruption-ridden banking system and failing courts, Russia has seen the steepest swing from growth into recession of any major economy during the financial crisis. Biden spoke after visits to Ukraine and Georgia intended to reassure those countries that U.S. resolve to support their independence would not be weakened by the administration's efforts to improve ties with Russia. The visits came a year after a brief and limited armed conflict between Russia and Georgia over separatist regions in the latter. 'The reality is the Russians are where they are,' Biden told The Wall Street Journal, according to excerpts posted on the newspaper's Web site. 'They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.' Biden rejected recent Russian assertions of a restored sphere of 'privileged interests' in areas of the former Soviet Union, made after the conflict in Georgia. He said he understood the Russians would not embrace the American stance, but added, 'I do expect them to understand we don't accept' the Russian claims. 'It's a very difficult thing to deal with, loss of empire,' Biden said at another point. In the most frank discussion yet on Russian expectations of the new diplomatic exchanges, Biden said the Russians anticipated that the United States would enter into diplomatic bargaining. Biden said: 'They think we'll be duplicitous and say, 'Yeah, OK, we got it. We'll make a deal with you on something else we need in return.'' Biden referred to the absence of strong American criticism of Russian military operations against separatists in the republic of Chechnya. 'Some argued the last administration made a deal on Chechnya in return for no response on Iraq,' he said. 'We're not going to do that. It's not necessary to do that.' The Russian retort had its own reference to the prior administration, albeit an oblique one. After noting the ambiguity of who was speaking for the administration, the president or his deputy, Prikhodko said, 'We have been there already.' 