A top-level meeting of the Russian-Iraqi Intergovernmental Commission for Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation was held in Baghdad on April 24 and 25. It produced 16 bilateral agreements and memos of understanding in telecommunications, trade, energy, electric power, manufacturing, information technology, transport and banking.
Yury Borisov, who headed the Russian delegation, traveled to Baghdad shortly after his April 20 Damascus visit. In Syria, the Russian deputy prime minister discussed the ways of reviving the country’s economy with President Bashar al-Assad and sealed Russia’s 49-year lease of the seaport of Tartus for economic uses. In 2017, Moscow and Damascus signed an agreement on the deployment of a Russian navy logistics support center in Tartus.