President Yoweri Museveni will later this week meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg, Russia for the Second Russia–Africa Summit in the resort city of Sochi.
“There will be a separate bilateral meeting between President Putin and President Museveni to exchange views on the most important areas of cooperation,” said Russia’s Ambassador to Uganda, Vladlen Semivolos.
“The discussions will focus on ways of deepening our cooperation with Uganda,” he added.
President Museveni will be accompanied by cabinet ministers, MPs, business people and journalists among others.
The Russia–Africa Summit is the highest-profile and largest-scale event in Russian–African relations, aimed at bringing about a fundamentally new level of mutually beneficial partnership to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
The goal of the event is to promote efforts to strengthen comprehensive and equal cooperation between Russia and African nations across all areas of society including politics, security, economic relations, science and technology, and the cultural and humanitarian spheres.
President Museveni, who last visited Russia in 2019, has since called for stronger bilateral relations especially in the areas of defense and security, economic and technical cooperation.
Russia has since disclosed plans to make Uganda a regional hub for development, upgrading and maintenance of Russian military equipment and technology.
“The center of maintenance of aviation equipment produced in the Soviet Union has been set up and made operational in Uganda,” said Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier this year.
“We intend to make it a regional hub,” said Lavrov, emphasising, “The military and technical cooperation between our two countries is a longstanding one.”
President Museveni recently commissioned into flight the first ever overhauled and upgraded Russian Type helicopter in sub-Saharan Africa in Nakasongola, Central Uganda.
Uganda has been under intense pressure from the United States not to help Russia to evade sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S. and European Union have since slapped sanctions on Russia’s defence industries, some move experts say would deny Russia billions of dollars in military exports.
But Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Jeje Odongo said it was “fallacious to think we (Uganda) can suddenly change in that situation.”