Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin yesterday began a two-day visit to China, as Moscow seeks to deepen trade ties with Beijing amid growing international isolation over its war in Ukraine.
At a Russia-China business forum in Shanghai, Mishustin said his nation’s farmers were ready to significantly increase agricultural exports to China, Russian news agency Interfax reported.
The Russian politician, who has been sanctioned by the US, Australia, Canada, the EU, New Zealand and the UK, added that China trade had helped Russia decrease its “dependence on the dollar.”
Photo: AFP
That effort had also been bolstered by increased trade in the two nations’ national currencies, he said.
Mishustin’s inaugural visit to China as prime minister comes as President Xi Jinping (習近平) has dispatched a special envoy to Ukraine and several European countries.
The simultaneous trips symbolize how Beijing is balancing maintaining ties with Moscow, while also trying to portray Xi as a global peacemaker with unique ties to leaders on both sides of Russia’s war.
Mishustin is expected to meet with Xi and Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing today, to discuss cooperation in energy, transport infrastructure and agriculture, the Russian government said.
He is also to meet former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who heads the New Development Bank in Shanghai.
Mishustin was set to be joined on the trip by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, who is responsible for energy, Bloomberg reported earlier.
Russian Minister of Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev last week said he was planning to attend, to discuss issues such as winter wheat and meat shipments to China, he told an agriculture conference aired by RBC TV on Friday.
A number of tycoons sanctioned by the US and its allies had also been invited, but it was unclear if they would attend. The Chinese foreign and commerce ministries did not respond to questions about the event.
China has refrained from joining the US-led sanctions campaign against Russia for triggering Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, and since then bilateral trade has boomed. China’s exports to Russia hit a record in April, jumping 153 percent from a year earlier to US$9.6 billion.
While China has been buying a lot of commodities from Russia, imports of wheat have been hampered by a slew of issues, including transportation challenges.
At yesterday’s forum, Mishustin said the two countries need to enhance food security, adding that Russian farmers can expand the range of goods supplied.
Chinese Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Secretary Chen Wenqing (陳文清), who sits on the Chinese Communist Party’s 24-member politburo, is visiting Russia this week to attend meetings on law enforcement and security, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
The US government has banned US government personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens, The Associated Press (AP) has learned. Four people with direct knowledge of the matter told the AP about the policy, which was put into effect by departing US ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The people would speak only on condition of anonymity to discuss details of a confidential directive. Although some US agencies already had strict rules on such relationships, a blanket “nonfraternization” policy, as it is known, has
RSS