Today, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will kick off her state visit to Russia with a meeting of members of the Russian and Argentine business communities in Moscow. Fernández de Kirchner and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to meet on Thursday to review and follow up on a series of trade, energy and military deals that were signed in July 2014, when Putin visited Argentina.
Fernández de Kirchner landed in Russia on Tuesday. Members of her delegation include Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman, Legal and Technical Secretary Carlos Zannini, Defense Minister Agustín Ross, and other government officials. The president recently tweeted, “We are meeting with CEOs of Russian companies that want to invest in our country.”
Indeed, Argentina’s National Commission for Atomic Energy (Comisión Nacional De Energía Atómica) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Rusatom on the sidelines of the Argentine-Russian business meeting headed by Fernández de Kirchner today. The MOU states that Rusatom’s subsidiary, TVEL, a nuclear fuel manufacturer, will supply nuclear fuel to scientific and power-generating reactors in Argentina.
Argentina’s energy company YPF and Russia’s Gazprom, a global energy company that holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, may also sign an MOU. Argentine energy company YPF’s CEO, Miguel Galuccio, is currently in Russia in hopes of concluding a contract on joint exploitation of shale oil and gas in the rich Vaca Muerta fields of the Patagonian province Neuquén.
Tomorrow’s official talks between Fernández de Kirchner and Putin will fall on the 130th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Russia has expressed a renewed interest in Latin America since Putin began his first official term as president in 2001.
