Now we are talking about concluding a free trade agreement between the Eurasian Economic Council, recently established in the post-Soviet space, and China. A similar agreement was concluded a short time ago with Vietnam. Then, we will coordinate, at least we are ready to do this, the Chinese concept of the Silk Road Economic Belt with our newly-created regional organisation. So, do you understand how diverse, multi-faceted and deep Russian-Chinese ties have become over the last couple of decades? And we resolved the border issue.
As to our trade and economic relations with China, they are growing more and more diverse each day, something we have worked on for a long time with our partners from China.
We spoke about economic sanctions only recently in Lima, within the framework of APEC. Almost all the leaders represented at APEC (the Asia Pacific region), Pacific countries, spoke about the same thing, namely, that we are going through a very acute crisis in world trade, international trade, related, among other things, to restrictions on the markets of certain countries.
I would like to draw attention to the fact that we have gone from pure trade [with China] in traditional goods [energy resources, such as hydrocarbons, oil and now natural gas, petrochemicals on the one hand and textiles and footwear on the other] to a whole new level of economic cooperation. For example, we are working together on space programmes. Moreover, we are developing and soon will begin the production of a heavy helicopter. We are now tracing the plan for the creation of a wide-body long-range aircraft.
However, crisis in world trade is, among other things, the result of using political tools in competition or simply for achieving political objectives with the help of economic restrictions.
We can tell the general public that the gold and foreign currency reserves of the Central Bank are not designed to finance the economy, but rather to ensure foreign trade turnover. Therefore, we need this level to be able to provide the necessary foreign trade turnover for such an economy as Russia's for a period of at least three months.
[Economic restrictions] is one of the elements that is destabilising the world economic order that was at one time created largely by the United States itself at the dawn of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that was later transformed into the World Trade Organisation.
If everything stops functioning our level will be able to ensure our trade turnover using its gold and foreign currency reserves for at least six months or more, which is more than enough.
Take the creation of the Pacific partnership or the creation of the Atlantic partnership. We are somewhat concerned because this is being done bypassing the World Trade Organisation, since it has proved impossible to reach compromise solutions with developing economies within the framework of that organisation. Is that good? Not really, in my opinion.
Therefore today we have an absolutely sufficient level of gold and foreign currency reserves in order to ensure economic stability and sustainable foreign trade turnover.
If the world economy is divided into isolated economic blocs of this kind, it will be rather difficult to achieve the same interpretation and application of international rules of economic activity and world trade.
I hope that there will be no particular need for us to attract external funding. It is worth noting that despite the fact the turnover is smaller now we are still maintaining a trade surplus.
After all, China is our largest trading partner. As I said, country-wise, Russia trades the most with China. That is my first point.
We do not trade territories although concluding a peace treaty with Japan is certainly a key issue and we would like to find a solution to this problem together with our Japanese friends.
Now we characterise Russian-Chinese relations as a strategic partnership, even a special strategic partnership. We have never had such a level of trust with China before. China is our major trade and economic partner among foreign states. We implement joint multi-billion projects. We cooperate not only within the UN Security Council, which is logical, as both China and Russia are permanent members of the UN Security Council, but also within such regional organisations as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, etc.
We have wide-ranging joint projects in the nuclear energy sphere, logistics, machine building and trade as a whole [with China].
Sanctions have nothing to do with this [relations with the People's Republic of China]. The decline in our mutual trade has objective causes, which are the energy prices and the exchange rate difference. But the physical volumes have not decreased, quite the opposite actually. They are growing.
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