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Middle East and North Africa

Russian expert confident that Middle East will overcome current challenges

The Russian expert links the region’s current situation to the progressing shift in the world order

MOSCOW, February 27. /TASS/. Moscow maintains close ties with nations of the Middle East and reckons that the region’s countries will overcome all hurdles that they currently face, the director of The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vitaly Naumkin, said at the forum dubbed: "The Middle East: When Will Tomorrow Come?" held by the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow.

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"Russia is not just an external global player for the Middle East, it is a country, whose people are closely bound up with the peoples of this region," he noted. "We are not strangers. We strongly believe that this region is significant for the whole world and will get through all the challenges it faces."

The Russian expert links the region’s current situation to the progressing shift in the world order. "Is the situation in the Middle East a painful death of an old order with unpredictable consequences, probably with ensuing chaos, or it is the labor pains of a new order’s birth," he asked. According to Naumkin, today it seems as if "somebody is testing out this rich, exclusively diversified region, and its system of nation states."

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Middle East and North Africa

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