Three Presidents joined President Vladimir Putin in addressing the plenary session of the 25th anniversary meeting of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) plenary on June 17: the Presidents of Kazakhstan, China, and Egypt, the latter through online speeches. The Egyptian government sent a high-powered team led by cabinet ministers to the SPIEF, which included a panel dedicated entirely to Russian-Egyptian economic cooperation. President Al Sisi’s address to the plenary made clear why.
No one is splitting Egypt and Russia. Al-Sisi praised the SPIEF as a leading platform for discussing the kind of “long-term political understandings that open the way for the growth of the global economy,” to then continue:
“Let me use this opportunity to reiterate that the Arab Republic of Egypt values its firm, historic friendship relations with the Russian Federation, and values the tangible progress the two countries’ relations have been witnessing over the past years in a multitude of vital sectors, for the two countries’ economies and the prosperity of the two peoples.”
