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Putin hails development of Russia-China relations

The Russian leader also believes that trade problems between the United States and China give Russia new opportunities to enter the Chinese market

SOCHI, October 18./TASS/. Russia is working on implementation of the agreements with China and is satisfied with the way relations with its neighbor develop, President Vladimir Putin told Yang Jiechi, member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau, meeting him after a session of the Valdai International Discussion Club on Thursday.

"We in Russia will be working to implement the agreements that we arrived at during a visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Vladivostok for the Eastern Economic Forum," he said. "We can be pleased with the way our relations develop. We rate highly the additional efforts towards the development of Russian-Chinese relations that we and Chinese friends make," Putin said.

Putin believes that trade problems between the United States and China give Russia new opportunities to enter the Chinese market. He also said that Russia plans to take the new open niches on the Chinese market.

Responding to questions from participants in the Valdai International Discussion Club, Putin noted that, due to problems between the US and China, President Xi Jinping’s initiative One Belt, One Road becomes even more relevant because all economic constraints, on the one hand, put pressure on the global economy and markets, but on the other hand create certain "windows of opportunity."

"This means that Russia can get an additional niche," the President said.

For example, he mentioned supplies of soybeans to China from the United States.

"So now we will be gradually entering this market with our soybeans and let the Chinese partners produce soybeans in the Far East if they want to invest their money," the Russian leader said.

Aircraft construction is another possible area of cooperation, he noted.

"China was a huge buyer of Boeing’s, we have now stepped up work with them to create a wide-body long-range aircraft, we will move further towards creating a heavy large helicopter, we will work together on a space program," Putin said.

He singled out cooperation in the military-technical sector.

"We have a huge turnover in the field of military-technical cooperation, and we agreed that we will be engaged not only in sales, but also in technology exchange. We are also interested in this not to the detriment of our security," the head of the Russian state stressed.

Among other projects, he called the development of infrastructure and transport routes.

"Of course, we are interested in developing Trans-Siberian railroad and Baikal Amur mainline, we expect that the freight traffic will increase four times by rail, the freight traffic along the Northern Sea Route (via the Arctic Ocean - TASS) will grow to 80 million tonnes," Putin said.