President Hu Jintao, who is in St. Petersburg to attend the outreach session of the G8 summit, met yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

The two leaders exchanged views on deepening bilateral ties as well as major international and regional issues.

 

Hu congratulated Putin on successfully hosting the outreach session of the G8 summit, saying that the meeting is of vital significance to facilitate the relations between developed and developing countries, promote multilateralism and to tackle the common challenges across the globe.

 

Putin said Hu has contributed a lot to the outreach session of the G8 summit, adding that Hu's participation is of vital importance to this summit.

 

During their meeting, Hu and Putin called for more cooperation in energy between China and Russia.

 

Hu said that energy cooperation between the two countries is facing vital opportunities for development.

 

He said that both countries are implementing the energy diversification strategy and they can complement each other in various aspects. "There is a great potential and bright prospects for both countries to undertake cooperation on energy," he said.

 

The Chinese president said that some major progress has been achieved on bilateral energy cooperation and that he hoped both sides would make concerted efforts to implement major energy cooperation projects.

 

Putin hailed energy cooperation between Russia and China, adding that substantial achievements have been scored in this field.

 

He said the Russian side would take further measures to actively promote economic cooperation with China, especially in energy.

 

The two presidents also discussed the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, calling for an early resumption of the six-party talks to resolve it.

 

The two leaders urged various sides to view the issue from the perspective of safeguarding peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the Northeast Asian region at large, demonstrate flexibility and resume the six-party talks as soon as possible.

 

The two presidents also urged various sides to make concerted efforts to realize the goal of making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons through dialogues. 

 

According to Chinese officials, after the outreach session of the G8 summit Hu also met Monday afternoon with French President Jacques Chirac and newly-elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, and attended a three-nation summit together with Putin and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 18, 2006)