SAMARKAND, September 16. /TASS/. The so-called Western partners are imposing illegal restrictions and unleashing trade wars, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters on Friday.
"We talked about what needs to be done additionally to expand the trade turnover, we talked about what needs to be done in modern conditions in order to effectively counter illegal restrictions, all sorts of trade wars that our so-called partners are unleashing here and there, so to speak," Putin said summing up his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
He noted that "various illegitimate restrictions" are being applied in the West.
"We are still forced to somehow react to this, we understand what is going on," Putin added.
The Russian leader, there was not any "most important topic" in the negotiations with Xi Jinping, and the meeting was "ordinary" after a long absence of face-to-face negotiations since the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
"We simply stated a significant increase in trade turnover. Last year, I already spoke about this, we had 140 billion [dollars]," the Russian president went on.
"We set the task of reaching 200 billion [dollars] of trade turnover. We thought it was some distant goal beyond the horizon. This year, the trade turnover will be around 180 [bln], maybe 190 billion dollars. That is, the goal of 200 billion will soon be reached," he said.
"We talked about the need to expand trade and settlements in national currencies, they are growing gradually - not as fast as we would like, but nevertheless, all this is moving forward. We talked about major projects that we are implementing. About infrastructure projects that would allow unblock growing commodity flows," the Russian leader added.