MOSCOW, April 27. /TASS/. Pakistan is interested in increasing the volume of investment from Russia, the country’s ambassador to Russia Shafqat Ali Khan told TASS on Monday.
In his opinion, bilateral trade and the economic sector in bilateral relations in general was "growing but we are not satisfied, it has to grow much more."
"There was an old legal dispute on our Soviet debt which was part of a litigation in Pakistan, which prevented Russian investments in Pakistan. Last year we resolved that problem. So that problem was taken care off. So now we are ready to take off in the commercial and investment field," he said.
"We think we can invest much more in one of our top priorities in our foreign policy - strong relations with Russia," he continued. "And we are sure that much more can be achieved, and there are many opportunities for win-win cooperation of Pakistan and Russia in these strong relationship."
In his words, Islamabad is also looking forward to extending people-to-people contacts between the two nations.
"Particularly we want to benefit from the excellent higher education opportunities available in Russian Federation for Pakistani students," he said. "We want more and more Pakistani students to receive higher education in Russia."
The ambassador stressed that the development of relations with Moscow remains among Pakistan’s foreign policy priorities. In his opinion, "Pakistan - Russia relationships are at the historically the strongest point" at the moment.
"Fundamentally I would not be overstating we don’t have big problems in our relations maybe some minor commercial dispute here or some issue there. It is a very friendly and deep cooperative relationship," he said.
Khan said that this year, the speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly was scheduled to visit Russia on the invitation of his Russian counterpart, Speaker of the Russian State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin. However, the visit did not take place due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.