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Kabul: Russian President Vladimir Putin entered the ancient city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
Mr. Putin is also scheduled to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
This meeting will be the first meeting between the leaders of Beijing and Moscow since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March of this year.
Experts are closely watching the meeting, as it will signal growing cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.
Economic and strategic relations between the two countries have been strengthened since the face-to-face talks between the presidents of the two countries in February in the Chinese capital.
This is the first trip of the Chinese leader abroad after the outbreak of the corona virus in 2019.
The Kremlin had previously announced that this meeting and summit would be an “alternative” to the Western world, which has isolated Russia in the world after the Ukraine war.
Kremlin foreign policy spokesman Yuri Ushakov said Mr Putin would also meet the leaders of India, Pakistan and Turkey, but his meeting with the Chinese leader was “of particular importance”.
He said that this meeting will “lay the groundwork for major political changes”.
The meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is going to officially start today.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization head meeting, which started today, will be without the presence of a representative from Afghanistan, but the situation in Afghanistan is likely to be one of the main topics of the leaders’ talks in Samarkand.
Afghanistan has participated in the meetings of SCO as an observer member since 2012, but for the second consecutive year after the Taliban came to power; no representative from Afghanistan has been invited to this regional meeting.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 2001.
This organization is a political, economic and security alliance in the Eurasian region, and China, Russia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan are its members.
Iran ,Afghanistan, Belarus and Mongolia are its observing members in this organization.
