Islamabad: Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan is scheduled to visit Moscow in the coming weeks at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, officials confirmed on Monday. The visit scheduled was disclosed a day after PM Khan had a “successful meeting” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“The prime minister has been invited. He will visit Moscow and meet President Putin” in coming days, said Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, without sharing the dates of the visit. “The visit will open new avenues of cooperation” for Pakistan and Russia, he said, adding that “our relations with Russia have gradually improved.”
Analysts described PM Khan’s scheduled visit to Moscow as an “extremely positive development” after the “successful visit” to Beijing, strengthening Pakistan’s ties with regional powers.
“The Pakistan-China joint statement signifies the success of PM’s visit to China” and the growing ambitions of the partnership, FM Qureshi said.
The leaders of Pakistan and Russia have remained in contact and spoken on the phone several times in recent months with the last interaction held in January 2022. But Khan’s upcoming meeting with Putin will be the first high-level visit by a Pakistani premier to Russia in over two decades.
The leaders of the two countries generally had direct interaction at the sidelines of the international conferences. PM Khan last had an informal conversion with President Putin at the SCO summit in 2019 at Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
‘New chapter’
Pakistan and Russia renewed efforts to deepen ties and began a “new chapter” after the visit of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to Islamabad in April 2021 - the first by a Russian foreign minister in nearly a decade. The two countries recently agreed to develop cooperation in economic, energy and defence. They also formally signed an agreement for a strategic venture called the Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline Project. The 1,100-km-long gas pipeline will secure the delivery of 16 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from LNG terminals in Karachi and Gwadar with those in Lahore. The $2.5 billion project is expected to be completed by 2023.
Islamabad-Moscow security partnership has been growing since 2014 when the two signed defence cooperation agreement. The two countries are gradually expanding military cooperation with military exercises, exchanges and consultations. In September 2021 meeting, the two sides identified joint exercises, intelligence cooperation and defence industrial cooperation as areas of cooperation. Pakistan and Russia also share an identical approach on Afghanistan to curb the threat of terrorism.
