Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with President of China Xi Jinping

Photo: MFA

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s opening remarks during a meeting with President of China Xi Jinping, Beijing, April 9, 2024:

Mr President,

Thank you for taking the time to receive our delegation. This is yet another confirmation of how much personal attention you pay to the development of cooperation with the Russian Federation.

It is my pleasure and honour to pass best regards from President of Russia Vladimir Putin. He highly appreciated your greetings on the outcome of the presidential election in March. The election was a testament to the Russian citizens’ wide support of the results achieved under Vladimir Putin’s leadership in the previous years, with respect to Russia’s comprehensive development, strengthening its sovereignty, ensuring its security and territorial integrity, and with respect to our foreign policy. One of our priorities is strengthening the multi-dimensional cooperation with the People’s Republic of China, as you have just said, along the lines of leaders’ diplomacy.

My colleague and friend, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and I try to follow your example. We had rather constructive talks today. President Vladimir Putin’s re-election guarantees the succession in our relations and our commitment to further progress across all areas.

Notably, it is thanks to the leaders’ diplomacy that Russia-China links have demonstrated stability and ability to adapt to any, even most challenging, conditions. Our bilateral relations are rooted in mutual support when it comes to the matters concerning the fundamental interests of the two countries.

Russia-China trade has hit a new high. The Year of Russian and Chinese Culture has been launched. The foreign political ties between Moscow and Beijing drive the increasingly popular efforts to build a more just multi-polar world order and ensure the security across Eurasia. We cooperate within the SCO. The EAEU is actively developing its cooperation with the Belt and Road initiative. BRICS is taking the centre stage in modern world politics, strengthening its authority and gaining more supporters who wish to join this association in one role or another, and consolidating the countries of the Global South. We spoke about this in detail today.

As the People’s Republic of China is marking its 75th anniversary, we would like to express our highest praise and admiration at the success achieved under your leadership over the years and mainly over the past decade. We are sincerely delighted at these achievements as they belong to our friends. We have noted that not everybody in the world share the same attitude and instead seek to hold back China and Russia’s development.

In 1949, the Soviet Union was the first state to recognise the new China. We have become allies since then. These 75 years have shown the importance, for us and the entire world, of mutual trust, neighbourliness, friendship, equality and mutually beneficial partnership-something that, as you and President Vladimir Putin stressed, outperforms the blocs dating back to the Cold War era and does not target any third party. I hope we will properly celebrate the 75th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations. We are ready to work on new strategic objectives set by our leaders.

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