MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is expected to receive in Moscow the visiting Chinese Prime Minister Li Kekiang on Tuesday.
On Monday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Li Kekiang held the 19th regular meeting of the heads of government of Russia and China that was crowned with the signing of a package of 38 documents.
The package includes a joint communiquй, an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the energy sector and on supplies of natural gas along the so-called eastern route, as well as agreements on avoiding double taxation, on antimonopoly regulations, on customs cooperation, and on collaboration in the field of satellite navigation systems.
In the format of the talks between the two Prime Ministers, a range of commercial agreements was signed. One of them is an agreement on expanding cooperation between the Russian natural gas producer Gazprom and the government-controlled oil company Rosneft, on the one hand, and China’s National Petroleum Corporation, on the other.
In the financial sector, agreements were signed by the largest Russian and Chinese banks like VEB, VTB, Rosselkhozbank, China’s Exim Bank, the State Development Bank of China, and the crucial financial organizations of the two countries.
China’s Deputy Prime Minister Wang Yang said earlier in Sochi, where a Russian-Chinese commission in charge of preparing prime-ministerial talks was holding its 18th session, that Beijing was strongly opposed to the West’s sanctions against Russia and found their imposition to be erroneous.
The beautiful city of Sochi reflects in some way the viability of the entire Russia, he said. Western countries introduced the sanctions by mistake, while the Chinese government was confident that in spite of unstable external factors the people of Russia would show resolve in clearing away the current difficulties.
Russia and China have intensified bilateral contacts in recent months. Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have held a range of talks since the beginning of the year to allow a buildup of mutual assistance, to expand bilateral openness, to put up resistance to external risks, and to grant loans to each other.
Officials in Beijing say that Russia and China should concentrate of promoting mutually beneficial strategic cooperation at a time when when the U.S. and the EU are striving to breed ‘color revolutions’ on the territories of opponent states.