Russian economic downturn not to harm trade with China: expert

Trade between Russia and China will not be affected by the worsening Russian economy, a Russian expert said Wednesday.

Statistics from the official Rosstat agency showed on Tuesday that Russia's gross domestic product shrank by 4.6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, marking a further drop compared with the 2.2 percent contraction in the first quarter. The figure was also worse than a preliminary government forecast of a 4.4 percent decline.

However, the factors that bring Moscow and Beijing closer to each other are strong enough for their cooperation to survive the hard times, Andrei Gorodetsky, deputy head of the Economic Institute in the Russian Academy of Science, told Xinhua.

Among those factors, he emphasized the two nations' interactions within the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative, the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, as well as the frameworks of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS.

Though Russia and China have to make certain corrections in their trade due to uncertain economic situation in both countries, no temporal difficulties will undermine the solid base of bilateral trade, the expert said.

Depreciation of the ruble was also to blame for the current slowdown in bilateral trade, he said.

"But the system factors behind Russia-China trade will outweigh the negative trends," he said. Endi