MOSCOW, September 21. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia will not focus entirely on the Eastern direction in its foreign policy after a chill in its relations with the West, Sergei Ivanov, the chief of the Kremlin administration, said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily that will be published on Monday.
“We are not going to fling into anybody’s arms, neither are we going to smother anyone with embraces. This is not our style,” he said.
He said he did not share an idea that Russian had swung to China. In his words, Russia’s trade with the European Union was four times as big as trade with China. “Now, due to the sanctions, it has inevitably dropped but, in any case, it is much bigger than trade with China,” Ivanov noted.
Russia, in his words, had concentrated on the “Asian vector in its foreign policy not in the moment of the Ukrainian crisis, but much earlier.” “No development of Russia’s Far East and its Asian part in general is possible without active participation of China, as well as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Asia Pacific countries,” he said.
He also noted that China was conducting independent foreign policy. “And today, countries that conduct independent foreign policy can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and, by the way, the crisis in the Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-European relations has demonstrated it once again,” Ivanov added.