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Putin Favors Stronger India in World Affairs
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow "would like to see India play a genuinely important role in international affairs," the Itar-Tass news agency reported Friday.
"We would like to see this because this is in our national interests," Putin said in an interview with the India Today magazine and the Moscow-based English-language Russia Journal newspaper on the eve of his visit to India, which starts on Monday.
The interview is scheduled to appear in Russia Journal on Saturday and in India Today on Monday, Tass said.
Putin dismissed the assumption that Moscow has forgotten the old ties of friendship with New Delhi and started looking west. "We have a saying: one old friend is better than two new ones," he said.
The president said India is a crucial factor for stability in the region and in the world as a whole and that Russian-Indian cooperation will never be directed against any third country.
"It is in our interests to have a strong, developed and independent India, an India that would be a major player on the world scene," Putin said. "We see this as one of the balancing factors in the world, and we will do all we can to ensure this doesn't change."
On domestic issues, Putin said the market economy and democratic government have "definitively won in Russia and are here to stay."
He dismissed any possibility that democracy, the market economy and freedom of the press could be reversed in Russia, Tass reported.
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