Xiaoyan Nascimento/AFP

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will attend today’s meeting in Berlin, along with the leaders of Russia, India, Japan and Canada, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

Xi and Modi have been in talks for more than a week about their economic ties. In March, after an international summit in Germany, the leaders agreed to further their “Belt and Road” initiative, pledging joint construction of new ports, railways and bridges.

This is now expected to include projects on the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 17-nation Maritime Silk Road, which would link Europe with Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

In January, Putin and Merkel said they would work to promote the initiative to build free trade and investment.

In the short term, the new German minister of economy and infrastructure, Markus Soeder, said at the time the Silk Road project was “far from being ready”.

He had recently warned that any projects to build rail links on the eastern approaches to the existing Russian-German railway links could run into problems.

With the Russian economy slowing recently and sanctions against Russia on top of low oil prices, Russia’s rail freight turnover fell by 15 percent in September from the previous year, according to a report in Moscow daily Kommersant.

In the first six months of the year, Russia lost $20 billion in freight traffic as a result of the economic sanctions and a fall in shipments of foodstuffs, it added.

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