The leaders of veteran allies Russia and India agreed on Monday to launch a joint unmanned mission to the moon, as well as to intensify deals on weapons and energy.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Russian President Vladimir Putin called during Kremlin talks for boosting their countries’ traditional ties, with a view to more than doubling trade by the end of the decade.
Speaking after the talks, Singh praised progress in their ”strategic” links and high-tech cooperation between the two.
”The symbol of our cooperation is the joint agreement to send a pilotless space ship to the moon for scientific investigation,” Singh said in comments broadcast on Russian state television.
Ahead of the talks, Russia’s space agency Roskosmos signed an agreement with the Indian space agency for joint lunar exploration until 2017.
”Russia and India will jointly build a space ship. Under the project we plan to send an entire laboratory to the moon,” Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov said in a statement.
High-tech and particularly military cooperation is at the centre of bilateral ties, Putin said.
”We paid particular attention to cooperation in nuclear energy and in military-technical cooperation,” Putin told journalists. ”I rate highly the results of our talks. A wide range of questions of bilateral relations were discussed as well as cooperation on the international level.”
The two sides managed to bring their positions closer on Afghanistan, Iraq and the Iranian nuclear programme, Putin said.
Asked by journalists about the prospects for closer ties between Russia, India and China, Singh said there is potential for closer cooperation.
”We attach great importance to our relations with Russia and China … in this increasingly interdependent world in which we live, we have an obligation to explore areas of convergence between the three of us.”
The two countries aim to boost bilateral trade to $10-billion per year by 2010 from $4-billion in 2006, Singh said.
Trade between Russia and India has long been dominated by Indian military spending.
”Russia is India’s most important partner in defence,” Singh said in an interview with the RIA Novosti news agency ahead of the visit.
Putin said that the two sides have agreed on a joint project to develop the Ilyushin 214 military transport plane roll and cooperation on a fifth-generation fighter jet. The deals ”open new prospects for our scientific, technical and production cooperation in sensitive areas,” he said.
”We intend to continue our cooperation in such high-tech sectors as telecoms and space exploration,” Putin added. — Sapa-AFP