RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other foreign leaders at the upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation(SCO) in Uzbekistan.
‘Intense preparations are now underway for the talks between our president and PRC President Xi Jinping that are planned to take place during the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand on September 15-16,’ Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told reporters on
Thursday.
The meeting ‘will be very important for obvious reasons’.
The talks will be part of ‘a number of bilateral meetings’ that Putin will have on the sidelines of the summit. The plan is also to hold the traditional trilateral summit of Russia, China and Mongolia, the official said.
Invitations to the summit in Samarkand were sent to many leaders, including from observer countries, which are the countries that maintain ties with this organisation.
Leaders have also been invited from the countries that show an interest in engaging with the SCO while having no formal status at the organisation, he said.
‘The two days in Samarkand will be very busy,’ Ushakov said.
Meanwhile, Russia’s President, according to plans, may address a range of summits, including G20 and APEC meetings, in the coming months, presidential aide Yury Ushakov said at a briefing on Thursday.
‘A schedule of meetings for this fall is quite busy. It includes a G20 summit in Indonesia on November 15-16, an APEC (summit) in Thailand on November 18 and an Association of Southeast Nations (summit) in Cambodia on November 11-13,’ he specified.
Commenting on Putin’s plans to participate in those meetings, Ushakov said: ‘As for (a G20 summit in) Bali and an APEC (summit) in November, we expect the president to take part, but we will confirm this later,’ he pledged, citing a number of reasons, including the spread of coronavirus.
According to the Kremlin aide, ‘an CSTO summit will also be held in Yerevan in November and an EAEU summit in Bishkek in December,’ with plans for the president to attend those as well.
Later in September, the Russian leader will travel to Samarkand, Uzbekistan for an SCO summit, and in October, he will attend a number of meetings in Kazakhstan.
Representatives from Russia and China discussed expanding bilateral economic and trade cooperation at a forum held in Vladivostok in Russia’s far east earlier this week.
The business forum ‘Russian-Chinese Cooperation in a New Age’ was held on Wednesday, a sideline of the 7th Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), which ended on Thursday.
In a speech via video, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui said economic and trade cooperation between the two countries has been resilient. China has been Russia’s largest trading partner for 12 consecutive years.
Russia’s trade representative in China Alexey Dakhnovsky said that Russia and China need to strengthen cooperation in e-commerce platforms, transportation and logistics, and facilitate cross-border payments between banks.
Nikolay Kharitonov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, said Russia’s Far Eastern regions should strengthen economic exchanges with Chinese provinces. He said they should further focus on developing high value-added products that Chinese consumers are interested in while promoting the development of e-commerce.
Zhou Liqun, president of the Union of Chinese Entrepreneurs in Russia, believes that both countries need to work to maintain the stability of the industrial and supply chains and to foster new growth points in the digital economy, green development and biomedicine.
The 7th EEF kicked off on Monday. The central theme of this year’s event was ‘On the Path to a Multipolar World.’
- The vast majority of the world’s population has not joined the infamous Western-orchestrated crusade to ‘cancel’ Russia and the disagreement with the US-led West’s aggressive policy is becoming louder and louder, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergey Naryshkin who also chairs the Russian History Society told journalists on Thursday.
‘The meeting itself with our Chinese partners and the closeness of the Chinese and Russian assessments of today’s global developments again and again confirm that the vast majority of the world’s population has not joined this odious Western campaign of what’s known as ‘cancelling Russia’.
‘Moreover, the disagreement with this aggressive cynical policy by the West’s totalitarian-liberal regimes is being expressed increasingly louder,’ he said following a Russian-Chinese roundtable discussion at the History Society.
Naryshkin noted that the understanding of global transformations underway is growing worldwide due to which ‘the role of interaction between experts – historians, political scientists, and philosophers – cannot be underestimated.’ ‘And, of course, we will continue this work in the future, with our Chinese colleagues as well,’ he added.
Separately, the ever-increasing US sanctions against Russia are turning the United States into an ever more asocial state, since they contradict the interests of a majority of the world community, which is striving for mutually beneficial trading and economic cooperation with Russia, the Chinese daily Global Times said in an editorial on Thursday.
‘Today, some US and Western public opinions wear tainted glasses,’ the article reads. ‘It is necessary to underline that the US and the West have no qualifications, nor the right, to prevent or interfere with other countries’ normal cooperation with Russia.
‘The majority of Asia-Pacific countries have not interrupted their economic exchanges with Russia. The same is true around the world. Severe sanctions cannot “expel” a major country from the global market, but will only make the US more “asocial”.’
The editorial’s authors point out that whenever it sees cooperation between China and Russia, the White House ‘reflexively and immediately’ become anxious about the ‘failure of sanctions’.
The United States instantly begins to ‘accuse China of sabotaging Washington’s global efforts’, the article reads.
‘As power politics is still a reality of international politics, the US and the West have indeed created a certain “chilling effect”, but this does not work for countries that insist on independent diplomacy.
‘The development cooperation between Asia-Pacific countries and Russia is endogenous and continuous, and is not subject to the anti-Russia will of some countries,’ the editorial points out.
‘China purchases energy and food from Russia in a bid to make ordinary people’s lives better. The same logic applies to other developing countries, including Thailand, India and Vietnam, that are boosting cooperation with Russia.’
The daily describes such mutually beneficial cooperation as ‘a legitimate right of sovereign countries that do not require “restraint”.
‘It also conforms to the principle of inclusiveness in global politics. It should be promoted and strengthened without fear of any country’s threat,’ the editorial stresses. ‘What should really be “restrained” is not the legitimate cooperation between China and Russia, but the geopolitical fanaticism that the US and the West have been unable to extricate themselves from.’