MOSCOW. May 12 (Interfax) - The developments currently unfolding in Sudan will not affect the earlier reached agreements on the construction of a logistics base of the Russian Navy, Sudanese Ambassador to Russia Mohammed Elghazali Eltijani Sirraj said.
"No, it will not impact the agreement in any way. Only its deadline may be moved because the political settlement in Sudan should resume in order to complete the democratic process of power transition," Sirraj said in an interview published in the Izvestia newspaper on Friday.
"The difficulty is that this agreement needs to be ratified by the legislative body, which has yet to be formed," the ambassador said.
"We have no parliament now, because Sudan is going through a transitional period. When it is over, we will have an elected government, which will be able to submit this agreement to the parliament for ratification," he said.
Sirraj gave an affirmative answer when asked whether the Russian Navy's logistics base, once it is built, could be used as a point for loading merchant ships.
"This base is an issue of military infrastructure, but, indeed, we could use the Red Sea ports in Port Sudan for importing goods from Russia and for exports from Sudan," the ambassador said.
Interfax reported earlier that the Russia-Sudan agreement on building a Russian Navy logistics base in Sudan was signed in Khartoum on July 23, 2019 and in Moscow on December 1, 2020. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in February 2023 that the agreement was undergoing the ratification process.