MOSCOW, April 16. /TASS/. Russian-Chinese military-technical cooperation is contributing to global and regional security, visiting Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said after a working meeting with Russian President Vladimiru Putin on Sunday.

Fragments of the meeting were aired by the Rossiya-24 television channel.

"In recent time, Russian-Chinese military-technical cooperation is developing very dynamically. This makes a contribution to global and regional security," he said.

The Chinese defense minister noted that his visit is a result of the agreements reached by the Russian president and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, during the latter’s visit to Russia in March. "This my first foreign visit after I took the office of Chinese defense minister. I chose Russia to stress the special character and strategic importance of our bilateral relations," he said, hailing the role of "personal friendship" between the two countries’ leaders.

The Russian defense ministry said on April 14 that Li Shangfu will pay his first foreign visit as defense minister to Russia on April 16-18. He plans to have talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoigu, to discuss "the current state and prospects for the development of bilateral cooperation in the defense sphere, as well as current issues of global and regional security."

Putin’s meeting with the Chinese defense minister was held shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow on March 20-22. On the first day of Xi’s visit, the two leaders spoke one-on-one for 4.5 hours and held talks in various formats for six hours on the following day. The visit yielded two joint statements of the presidents.

A month prior, on February 22, Putin received Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and member of the CCP Politburo Wang Yi.