An indigenous peak this week where Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet China’s Xi Jinping and other Asian leaders will showcase an “volition” to the Western world, the Kremlin has said.
Putin and Xi will be joined by the leaders of India, Pakistan, Türkiye, Iran, and several other countries for the peak of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation(SCO) in the Uzbek megacity of Samarkand on Thursday and Friday.
“The SCO offers a real volition to Western-centric organizations,” Kremlin foreign policy counsel Yuri Ushakov told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.
“All members of the SCO stand for a just world order,” he said, describing the peak as taking place “against the background of large-scale geopolitical changes”.
The SCO — made up of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and four ex-Soviet Central Asian countries was set up in 2001 as a political, profitable, and security organization to compete with Western institutions.
The meeting will be part of Xi’s first trip abroad since the early days of the coronavirus epidemic and comes with relations between Russia and the West shattered by the conflict in Ukraine.
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‘Largest organization in the world’
Putin will hold addresses with Xi, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday, Ushakov said, before attending the main session of the peak on Friday.
The SCO, Ushakov said, “is the largest organization in the world, it includes half the population of our earth”.
On Friday he’ll also meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“The meeting with Xi is of particular significance, major transnational and indigenous motifs will be bandied,” including the conflict in Ukraine and growing Russia-China profitable ties, Ushakov said.
Read More: All eyes on Xi-Putin meeting at SCO summit
