Putin traveled to Beijing as joint projects with China are losing momentum and after trade between the two countries declined previous year amid Russia’s longest recession in two decades.
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On top of signing a number of agreements, Putin is also in China to help mark a pair of strategic milestones between the two countries.
Russian Federation and China are hoping to strengthen economic ties as their leaders signed more than 30 deals on infrastructure, trade, innovation and technology during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing.
Noting that both nations are the world’s major economies and emerging markets, he said they should deepen pragmatic cooperation and alignment of interests, and push forward the dovetailing of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) for broader regional economic cooperation.
“This similarity or coincidence is backed by concrete work, including efforts on the technical level”.
“To say we have strategic cooperation is not enough anymore”, Mr. Putin told the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency in a pre-trip interview.
Most significantly, perhaps, Russian Federation has sold China its cutting-edge S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
He also underlined, following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Uzbekistan, that the Brexit is Britons’ choice and Moscow has never interfered in the issue. We are to formalize this decision at the Tashkent meeting. They are also both poised to attend this year’s Group of 20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou in September.
“It seems to me, it is clear why this has happened: first, no one wants to feed and subsidize weaker economies, support other countries, entire peoples”, Putin told.
He said: “Russia is open to discuss this crucial issue and has a couple of times shown its readiness for dialogue”.
“One of the most important directions is of course the diversification of our ties, making them more sophisticated, paying more attention to the high-tech area of our collaboration”, the Russian president added.
Others have said Brexit will actually harm Putin as it could lead to the United Kingdom committing itself even more defiantly to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance, which has led the way in countering Russian aggression. He welcomed Chinese investments “as a means of further developing our partnership”.
In a later deal, a branch of CNPC, China’s state-owned energy company, bought a stake in an enormous liquefied natural gas plant in the Arctic. “It’s around 40 million tons [per year]”.
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Chinese companies and banks also have been cautious about developing their business in Russia, fearing that it could adversely affect their operations elsewhere due to the spiraling Russia-West tensions and Western sanctions. At the St. Petersburg forum, Russian Federation signed a string of deals to develop rocket engines, airplane engines and helicopters for China while talks also advanced on potential Chinese participation in a high-speed rail project between Moscow and Kazan.
