UNITED NATIONS, October 7. /TASS/. Russia attaches major significance to the development of integration process across the space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, a high-ranking Russian foreign ministry official said on Monday.
"We attach great significance to the development of integration processes as major instruments of economic growth," Yevgeny Stanislavov, director of the ministry’s economic cooperation department, said at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly Economic and Financial Committee.
"The establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union has made it possible to consolidate cooperation between its member nations in the interests of accelerated development and adaptation of the national economies to the changes in the global economic situation," he said. "Our priority is also to create a Greater Eurasian Partnership, a wide integration association from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean involving the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN, and other Eurasian states, including the European Union countries."
At the same time, he drew attention to the emergence of new division lines in the global economy. "There are attempts to substitute WTO norms for time-serving ‘rules’ with geopolitical implications: methods of unfair competition, protectionism, trade wars and unilateral sanctions," he noted. "It leads to fragmentation of the global economic space and deprives businesses of any predictability, a major driving force of their development. Hence, it negatively impacts people’s lives."
Bearing this in mind, in his words, a major task now is to "strengthen multilateral regulation of trade through protection and simplification of the universal, open, non-discriminating and fair trade system within the WTO." Russia is ready to work with its WTO partners on reasonable initiatives to reform and modernize it, he added.