Alexey Dedov: ‘Downturn in Russia-Pakistan Trade Only Temporary’

Anil Datta of the News reports on the Russian Ambassador H.E. Alexey Dedov’s talk in PIIA on 10 April 2015

The volume of Russia-Pakistan trade in 2013 was to the tune of US $547 million, which decreased to US $474 million in 2014, but it is earnestly hoped that these figures would pick up once again. This was stated by Alexey Dedov, Russian Ambassador to Pakistan, in an interactive session with members of The Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA), the media, and the academia at the institute on Friday evening. While not citing a specific reason for this slight downturn, H.E. Ambassador Dedov nevertheless termed the decline a temporary phenomenon. Replying to a question about the proposed privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills, a project established wholly by the former Soviet Union, he said that in his recent meetings with the PSM officials, he had been told that the project was producing at 42 percent of its capacity which, under the present global economic conditions and Pakistan’s economic problems, was not a bad record. Dedov said he saw no prospects of, or need for, privatisation of the mill.

Turning to Yemen, he said the role of external players was not to bomb the country, but to mediate reconciliation between the warring factions and spare the locals of death and massacre. He reiterated that both, the presidents of Yemen and Ukraine, were elected in the most democratic and transparent of manners, and the coups that overthrew them were illegal.