Russia has nothing to fear from China, and concerns that millions of Chinese will some day occupy vast swathes of Russian territory in the Far East are overblown, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Monday.
China and Russia say their trade and political relations are better than ever, though senior Russian officials are privately concerned about an increasingly assertive China along Moscow’s vast and largely empty southeastern border.
China, the world’s fastest growing major economy, has sought to secure long-term oil and gas supplies from Russia, the world’s biggest energy producer, which has a population of 142 million compared with China’s 1.3 billion.
“There is no threat on the side of China. We have been neighbors for hundreds of years. We know how to respect each other,” Putin told Russia experts from the Valdai discussion group at a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
“China does not have to populate the Far East to get what it needs — natural resources. We deliver oil and gas. There are huge coal reserves near the Chinese border. China does not want to aggravate the situation with us,” Putin said.
Russian leaders court Beijing and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has held several hours of talks with Putin, including private one-one-one negotiations and a dinner at Putin’s country retreat in May.
Putin opened a pipeline last month to carry Siberian oil to China and Moscow is keen to diversify its client base away from dependence on Europe by selling more oil, gas and metals — Russia’s biggest exports — to China.
However, behind the warm phrases of support for closer ties, many Russian policymakers are increasingly anxious about China’s rise as a world economic and political power.
Projections by Goldman Sachs show China could supplant the US as the world’s biggest economy by 2027. China’s economy grew by about 8.7 percent to US$4.9 trillion last year, while Russia’s economy shrank 7.9 percent to US$1.23 trillion after a 10-year economic boom, according to IMF data.
Putin said the development of Eastern Siberia and the Far East was a priority for Russia and that he hoped cooperation with China would deepen.
“It is no secret that this is an enormous territory, an underpopulated territory which has massive potential,” he said.
Some economists say the rise of China could help drive the development of Russia’s Far East by forcing investment into an area where population density in some areas is less than 2 people per kilometer, compared with 50 to 100 people per kilometer just over the border in China.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
RSS