SCO2024 Pakistan
Russia in 2014 led original members of the Shanghai Five excluding China to create its own Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Later, EAEU brought another SCO member Iran into a free trade agreement, although it has not concluded an FTA with China yet, neither under the SCO framework nor under the EAEU framework.
The main reason why Russia and China could not work out an FTA is that Russia sees FTAs as a tool to establish economic and political blocs and in the presence of China, it could never dominate that bloc. This explains that despite extensive military cooperation with Moscow, the Chinese economy is more tightly coupled with the US and Australia than Russia.
This led China to launch its own One Belt, One Road, later called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that involved Central Asian as well as African countries as part of its new Silk Route…
