By Paul Jouvenet, jurist and essayist. Eurasia Business News, October 17, 2023

Picture : Vladimir Putin has arrived in Beijing, China, today.

On October 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing for a two-day visit, where he will participate in the III International One Belt, One Road Forum, hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and hold bilateral meetings with the Vietnamese President, the Thai Prime Minister, the President of Mongolia and the President of Laos. Leaders from 23 states will participate in the Beijing forum. The theme of this year’s forum will be “High-quality cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative”.

The Russian president held talks with Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong and then with Thai Prime Minister Settha Thawisin.

After that, the Russian president will attend the official welcoming ceremony of Chinese President Xi Jinping of the heads of delegations who will arrive at the One Belt, One Road forum. The meeting and the forum itself are scheduled to be held at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. This is where Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meetings and other official events are usually held. After that, President Putin will hold two more bilateral meetings with Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh and Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith.

The next day, October 18, Vladimir Putin will participate in the One Belt, One Road forum itself, including the forum’s opening ceremony. The Russian president will speak at the forum as a keynote guest, presidential adviser Yuri Ushakov said on October 16. He will speak immediately after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome speech.

Afterwards, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will hold Russian-Chinese talks in a narrow and expanded format, and a one-on-one conversation is not ruled out, Ushakov said. The Russian delegation includes Deputy Prime Ministers Alexander Novak and Dmitry Chernychenko, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov, Minister of Transport Vitaly Savelyev, Governor of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina, Director of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation Dmitry Shugayev, General Director of Russian Railways Oleg Belozerov.

Also present in Beijing are the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sberbank German Gref, the Chairman of VTB Bank Andrei Kostin, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Novatek Leonid Mikhelson, the Director General of Rosatom Alexey Likhachev, the Director General of Rosneft Igor Sechin, the owner of the Volga Group Gennady Timchenko, the Chairman of VEB RF Igor Shuvalov. In addition, the delegation includes representatives of the presidential administration – presidential assistants Yuri Ushakov and Maxim Oreshkin, as well as presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov. At the end of his visit, Vladimir Putin is expected to hold a press conference in Beijing.

The Russian president met today with Chinese President Xi Jinping before the Belt and Road Forum. This was reported by the press service of the Kremlin.

The Russian leader arrived at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where a meeting of the heads of delegations participating in the One Belt, One Road forum, as well as the forum itself, will be held. Vladimir Putin was greeted by Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan.

In a video released by the Kremlin, the leaders shook hands and then took a photo together. After that, a group photo was taken with all the participants of the forum.

Vladimir Putin will attend the One Belt, One Road Forum for the third time. The current visit was actually a response to Xi Jinping’s official visit to Russia, which took place from March 20 to 22, 2023, in Moscow.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin flew to China from May 22 to 24, where he attended a Russian-Chinese business forum in Shanghai and held talks with Xi Jinping. A month ago, Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Russia. Vladimir Putin received him in St. Petersburg.

China and Russia are two nuclear powers, which grew closer in the 2000s, sharing a common opposition to the influence of the United States and its allies on the international stage. Both countries are founding members of the BRICS and members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

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The alliance between China, an industrial giant, and Russia, the leading power in mineral resources, constitutes a geopolitical force unequalled in history, whose foundation is Eurasia, the “heart of the world”, as the British geographer Halford John Mackinder already considered in 1904 in his article The Geographical Pivot of History. This theory was, however, criticized by Nicholas John Spykman, professor of international relations at Yale University in the 1930s, who defended the primacy of the “Rimland”, the coastal strip of the Eurasian continent, over the “Heartland”.

Read also : BRICS Summit 2023: August 22-24 in Johannesburg

The Belt and Road Forum will be held for the third time in 2023. The forum is attended by countries that have joined the initiative of the People’s Republic of China of the same name. The first Belt and Road Forum was held on May 14-15, 2017 in Beijing, and the second was held in Beijing from April 25-27, 2019.

Read also : The BRICS Bank wants to move away from US dollar

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