Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had talks via video conference with Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan Mukhtar Tleuberdi.
The parties discussed in detail a wide range of issues of bilateral and international cooperation between Russia and Kazakhstan, the countries that built a strategic partnership based on the Treaty on Good Neighbourliness and Alliance in the 21st Century.
The foreign ministers also discussed the major trends in trade and economic cooperation and integration interaction with a focus on priority measures for the post-crisis recovery of mutual ties (in industrial cooperation and joint production of high value-added products) and also to bring integration to a new level. The most significant event in this context is the 17th Russia-Kazakhstan Interregional Cooperation Forum, scheduled for this autumn n Kazakhstan and to be attended by the heads of states.
The ministers "compared notes" on preparations for the main bilateral political events. The earliest one is President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s attendance of the ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War in Moscow on June 24. The uniting significance common historical heritage for our countries and the heroic pages of the acts of the Soviet people in defeating Nazism were stressed. Countering attempts to falsify history, rewrite the outcome of the war and glorify Nazi criminals and their accomplices is critical.
In the cultural and humanitarian part, the Ministers discussed discussed plans for holding Days of Russian Culture in Kazakhstan . They reaffirmed their interest in quickly approving the amended legislative groundwork for the opening of Russian university branches in Kazakhstan, as well as implementing other mutually advantageous cooperation projects in education. In the 2019/20 academic year, almost 74,000 Kazakhstani students studied in the Russian Federation with 30,000 of them receiving grants from the Russian budget. On average, over 9,000 students from Kazakhstan receive government-funded tuition at Russian universities annually.
Russia and Kazakhstan’s approaches to enhancing partnership within the EAEU, the CSTO, the CIS, the SCO as well as the UN and the OSCE remain similar. The coinciding views on the two countries’ priorities were stressed, primarily in anti-terrorism, fighting drug trafficking, defending traditional values and countering Christianophobia and Islamophobia.
Lavrov and Tleuberdi exchanged views on major trends in the global and regional arenas. Special attention was made on the alignment of integration processes within the CIS and the Eurasian Economic Union. Issues of international security and strategic stability were covered with a special emphasis on the need to maintain predictability and restraint in the nuclear missile area. Cooperation prospects in solving issues of ensuring biological and chemical security including within the related multilateral formats were discussed as well.
The Russian side expressed support for the Central Asian nations’ successful efforts at regional consolidation. Both parties confirmed their interest in holding a third meeting of the “5+1” (five Central Asian states plus Russia) format at the foreign minister level.
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Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry
Based on materials from Press service of the Russian Foreign Ministry