South Sudan, Russia Identify Oil, Gas as Avenues for Cooperation - Foreign Minister

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - South Sudan and Russia have identified oil, gas and infrastructure as areas for further cooperation, the foreign minister of the African country, Awut Deng Acuil has told Sputnik.

"Well this is when we signed the memorandum, this is what I am following up. 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.

The foreign minister visited Moscow from January 27-29, where she met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei 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.