BEIJING, October 17. /TASS/. The Belt and Road initiative expands Russia’s opportunities for comprehensive cooperation with China, including through interaction with the Eurasian Economic Union, Andrey Bystritsky, the board chairman of the Foundation for the Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club, has told TASS in an interview.

"For Russia, interaction with China within and around this project, through interaction with the Eurasian Economic Union, is a way of creating a new world. It is the most important political process in which the country can participate. This project for building a new world has a great future," said Bystritsky, who is in Beijing for participation in events within the framework of the third forum of international cooperation Belt and Road.

Bystritsky believes that of particular interest is how, including through the Belt and Road projects, a new configuration of the modern world is being formed, with its new rules of trade, relations and interaction.

Russia, he said, is also involved in radical and very significant transformations of the modern world in moving towards a just world order. There are many elements of such an order, Bystritsky continued, and they are all interconnected with each other. The Belt and Road initiative is linked to BRICS and, in parallel, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), he believes.

"We see many such elements of the future in the Chinese idea of a community of common destiny. All these initiatives and projects create a complex, intricate and remarkable future-oriented global mosaic. We are witnesses to a major historical process. All of the above, including the SCO, are its elements," Bystritsky said.

The Belt and Road initiative is a concept Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed in 2013 with the aim to intensify multilateral trade and investment projects with the participation of countries concerned and Chinese and foreign capital. More than 150 states and more than 30 international organizations have already joined it.