The traditional New Year's Eve summit of the CIS continues on Tuesday in St. Petersburg. Russian President Vladimir Putin will host the leaders of the Commonwealth at an informal breakfast to be held at the Russian Museum.
As Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian head of state, noted, it will be "a good opportunity for the participants of the event to continue communicating." He also said that Putin has not planned trilateral talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and with the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Sadyr Zhaparov and Emomali Rahmon, but that bilateral contacts "will take place" in the framework of the summit.
The day before, on Monday, the summit meeting was held. The main results of the outgoing year were summed up, and an exchange of views on the main directions of further cooperation took place. In his opening remarks, Putin pointed out that challenges, security threats, and disagreements in the CIS space are growing, but the main thing is that the Commonwealth countries are ready to cooperate. He added that the meeting in St. Petersburg was held in a friendly circle, and that deepening cooperation between the states was in their core interests.
Also, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan spoke in the public part. In particular, he spoke about the need to improve the capacity and strengthen the role of the CIS in the world arena in the face of new challenges. In addition, Tokayev proposed to work on the elimination of barriers to trade in the Commonwealth. Speaking of humanitarian ties, the Kazakh president noted that the role of the Russian language in strengthening the common language space cannot be questioned in any way.
Earlier, Chairman of the Executive Committee - CIS Executive Secretary Sergei Lebedev generally expressed the hope that the informal summit would give an additional impetus to the development of cooperation both in the Commonwealth and in the Union State of Belarus and Russia.
GSV "Russia - Islamic world"
Photo: official website of the President of the Russian Federation
Based on materials from TASS