TEHRAN, January 23. /TASS/. Visiting speaker of the Russian State Duma, or lower parliament house, Vyacheslav Volodin met on Monday with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to discuss the development of bilateral relations, the Duma press service said.
"Vyacheslav Volodin and Ebrahim Raisi discussed the development of relations between the two countries. <…> Vyacheslav Volodin conveyed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greetings and warm wishes," it said.
During the meeting, Volodin noted that Russia and Iran stand for a just world order and call for ensuring global and regional security. "Western dictatorship can only be opposed to the freedom of development of countries and peoples," he stressed. "In this context, preserving sovereignty and independence is of paramount importance for the two countries."
Volodin is leading a Russian parliamentary delegation which arrived in Tehran on an official visit on Sunday. The Russian delegation includes deputy speaker Sergey Neverov, who is in charge of the house’s relations with the Iranian parliament, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and chair of the Duma’s international committee Leonid Slutsky, chair of the Duma’s committee on the financial market Anatoly Aksakov, chair of the defense and corruption committee Vasily Piskarev, and chair of the transport committee Yevgeny Moskvichev.
Volodin has already held talks with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and took part in the third meeting of the interparliamentary cooperation commission.
Earlier in January, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with his Iranian counterpart over the phone to discuss further development of bilateral cooperation. According to the Kremlin press service, the two leaders spoke in favor of the implementation of mutually beneficial projects in the energy and transport-and-logistics spheres.
Their previous phone call took place in November 2022, when they also focused on bilateral cooperation. In September, Putin and Raisi met on the margins of a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Samarkand. In July, Putin visited Tehran to attend an Astana-format trilateral meeting of the leaders of the Syrian settlement guarantor nations.