MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The project of pairing the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and China's Silk Road Economic Belt initiatives should move to practical phase, former Kyrgyz Prime Minister Djoomart Otorbaev told Sputnik on Monday.
"There is a declaration, but there are no complex road maps or concrete moves. The conjunction [of the two projects] is a multilateral complex plan, but it should move from pure declarative plan to a more concrete action," he said on the sidelines of the Russian International Affairs Council conference in Moscow on Russia-China relations.
In May 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping signed a joint declaration "on cooperation in coordinating the development of the Eurasian Economic Union project and the Silk Road Economic Belt."
"Two projects are mainly economic, so the main idea [of cooperation] is to develop the economies of the countries that lay on the Silk Road and are the members of the Eurasian Economic Union," Otorbaev added.
China's Silk Road Economic Belt is a Chinese government's economic development framework announced in 2013 for primarily integrating trade and investment in Eurasia on favorable conditions.
The EEU is an economic association founded by Russia and including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
