Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit China early next week, Russian diplomacy has announced. Beijing is a key diplomatic partner of Moscow, whose relations with the West have been at freezing point since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Lavrov will visit China on Monday, April 8 and Tuesday, April 9. Among other things, he will meet with his Chinese counterpart Wang I, with whom he intends to discuss “a wide range of topics of bilateral cooperation” or common positions in international groups such as the UN, the BRICS group of developing countries, the G20 and others, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The head of Russian diplomacy last visited China last fall. Before that, he met with Wang I in Moscow.
Beijing is now Russia’s most important ally, which faces Western sanctions because of its war campaign against Kiev. China criticizes these measures and refuses to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but at the same time it benefits from lower prices for oil and gas, which Russia can no longer sell to Europe.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (December 2023) | Reuters