Russia, US strike WTO deal

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Moscow, Nov 10: Russia has reached a bilateral trade deal with Washington to join the World Trade Organisation, a major breakthrough after 13 years of tortuous negotiations, the head of the country’s business lobby said on Friday.

“A deal has been made,” Alexander Shokhin, the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, told Reuters by telephone from Beijing where he was accompanying economy minister German Gref on a trip.

Earlier, deputy economy minister Andrei Sharonov told Reuters that “the word in Moscow is that there is agreement.” “We hope that the two presidents might finalise the negotiations in Vietnam early next week,” Sharonov said.

Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush are due to shake hands on the deal when they meet in mid-November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hanoi, said Shokhin.

Earlier, a top Kremlin official said Russian and U.S. leaders were likely to agree a bilateral deal soon.

“Talks have been going on nearly round the clock ... I think completing the talks is fully realistic,” Arkady Dvorkovich, the head of the Kremlin’s economic staff, said in an interview.

News overnight that Bush plans a stopover in Moscow on his way to the summit in Hanoi increased expectations that a WTO deal had been clinched. The summit starts on November 18.

“We hope that the two presidents might finalise the negotiations in Vietnam early next week,” Sharonov said.Agreement with the United States is the key to the 149-member WTO accepting Russia, currently the world’s biggest non-WTO nation. It could give Russia’s $1 trillion economy a lift similar to that enjoyed by China after its 2001 accession.

Talks between the U.S. and Russia over WTO entry have dragged on for 13 years. The main sticking points have been Moscow’s unwillingness to grant access to U.S. meat imports and Washington’s concerns about Internet and video piracy in Russia.

Dvorkovich said a bilateral trade agreement with Washington would allow Russia to wrap up a comprehensive accession deal with the WTO within months.“It’s mutually beneficial — it’s in the interests of Russia because we receive the opportunity to operate in foreign markets, and introduce foreign countries to the Russian market on the basis of established rules that everyone tries to observe in the world market as a whole,” he said.