South Sudan and Russia plan to sign a memorandum on partnership in the oil and gas sector, the foreign minister of the African country, Awut Deng Acuil told Russian media.
The minister added that her nation wants to extend cooperation with Russian businesses to other areas, including infrastructure.
The foreign minister visited Moscow from January 27-29, where she met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to continue talks they started during the 2019 Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding during the event.
“There will be a memorandum signed, this is what I am following upon. Now, we identified the areas where we can cooperate with Russia.
We know that there is a very good technology in terms of natural gas, also in the petroleum sphere, and we have coal we have so many minerals so we wanted to identify the areas where the Russian companies can now come. They can come even to the refinery [sector], and to infrastructure because we do not have roads we do not have a railway,” she said when asked about oil and gas contracts with Russian companies.
According to her, the country currently produces 170,000 barrels of oil per day and plans to reach 200,000 barrels per day this year.
When asked about potential military cooperation, the minister replied that there was “nothing like that” between the two countries.
