What will Putin's visits to Saudi Arabia and the UAE bring

Russian President Vladimir Putin began this week with trips to the Gulf countries. On Monday he held negotiations with the King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdel Aziz Al Saud in the Al-Yamama Palace in Riyadh and discussed coordination of efforts to stabilize oil prices, the state of affairs in Syria and the Persian Gulf region, Palestinian-Israeli settlement, as well as bilateral cooperation in the fields of energy, agriculture, industry, military-technical cooperation and cultural and humanitarian exchanges. Yesterday, in the palace of Qasr al-Watan in Abu Dhabi, during talks with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United Arab Emirates, Muhammad bin Zayed Al Nahyan, he spoke about cooperation in the trade, economic and investment spheres. President of Russia and the Crown Prince also took part in a meeting with representatives of business circles of Russia and the UAE.

Commenting on negotiations in both capitals, assistant to deputy chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation, deputy chairman of the Association of Russian Diplomats Council, Andrei Baklanov, stated that their goal was to balance pace of development of our relations: "There were ups, downs, there were periods of intense communication and periods when things just didn’t work out. Right now the main task is to ensure that our relations develop in a positive way, without any downslides. A package of agreements on trade and economic cooperation has been signed."

"Today we have a lot of associations - the Russian-Arab Business Council, the Export Support Fund - but we need to join efforts and create a body where any entrepreneur, representatives of medium-sized businesses could contact any time, because large ones have already established close contacts, everything is normal in this direction. We need to continue to move forward towards creation of big unification center," Andrei Baklanov said.

Deputy Director of the Institute for Prediction and Settlement of Political Conflicts, Alexander Kuznetsov, mentioned cooperation between Russia and Saudi Arabia under the OPEC + agreement, which was signed at the end of 2016 and extended at the end of 2017: “During Putin's visit to Saudi Arabia they've signed an energy charter and the agreement on long-term partnership within the framework of OPEC+, in other wrods, these are not one-time agreements, it's the beginning of constant work. We witnessed dramatic drop in world oil prices in 2015, which hit the economies of oil exporting countries — both Russia and Saudi Arabia. Until that moment, there was no coordination between Russia and the OPEC countries, and signing of the OPEC+ agreement on temporary reduction in oil production and monitoring allowed us to increase world oil prices from $45 per barrel, which we saw in 2015-2016, to the current $65-67. This is an acceptable level."

“Unfortunately the world economy of recent years is extremely volatile and unpredictable. Development of this pricing policy and creation of such cartel will allow us to secure our economies and significantly reduce risks,” Alexander Kuznetsov believes.

Member of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Rasul Botashev, noted that meetings between the leaders of the countries could play a huge role in the Gulf countries: “When businessmen see that leaders of the countries meet in warm atmosphere, go on official visits to each other, it gives a message to entrepreneurs to get closer to other countries. That's why visits to the UAE and Saudi Arabia are of great importance as a direct message to business community and the entire region."

According to Rasul Botashev, Russia has a huge export potential in  these countries: “98% of everything consumed in these countries is import. This is a huge potential for export of our technologies and agricultural products, medicine. Due to sanctions, our trade turnover with Europe has halved. And the Middle East is the direction where we could increase this turnover... We returned to the Middle East, and this is good for stability and prosperity of this region."