MOSCOW, May 18 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will promote its national interests by ratifying an additional frontier agreement with China. In particular, the instrument will remove what can eventually prove a stumbling block in bilateral relations, stressed Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was addressing a joint session of the security and international affairs committees of the State Duma, parliament's lower house. China ratified the agreement, April 27, and the Duma is expected to follow, May 20. "Russia is interested in exhaustive formalization of its frontier with China, so the agreement is in conformity with its national interests.
The matter implies strengthening Russian statehood and regional integrity protection," the minister explained his point.
"A potential irritant will vanish from bilateral relations; an irritant, which, if it survives, threatens to escalate tentative tensions. To preserve these ambiguous prospects means to come against the present scope of our contacts -- strategic partnership with an absence of whatever mutual territorial claims.
"The agreement cancels all frontier issues on which the Parties remained at the negotiating table for forty years. Now, we shall have, for a first-ever time, a legally formalized Russo-Chinese frontier."
To ratify and implement the agreement means to offer beneficial conditions for constructive partnership with China and for the progress of the Russian Far East, Lavrov said.
Frontier demarcation will start as soon as the agreement is ratified. Meanwhile, the frontier will stay where it used to be.
It will take an intergovernmental agreement, a map valid for both Parties supplementing it, to start final demarcation, added the Foreign Minister.
The agreement in question was signed, October 14, 2004, during President Vladimir Putin's visit to China.
A previous agreement, signed in 1991, concerned 98 per cent of the entire Russo-Chinese frontier -- total length exceeding 4,300 kilometers. It included stretches along the rivers Amur and Ussuri, the frontier appointed in the middle of the fairway.
Now, the additional agreement concerns another two stretches -- the vicinity of Bolshoi island in the upper reaches of the river Argun, and an area round the islands Tarabarov and Bolshoi Ussuriisky, close to Khabarovsk, administrative center of a vast Russian territory. The involved stretches, put together, make less than 2 per cent of the total frontier length.
In either instance, the border goes not only along the rivers but also across the islands for Russia and China to divide between themselves the total area, which slightly exceeds 370 square kilometers, in approximately equal portions.
