MOSCOW, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- Russia will complete its part of the bridge over the Heilongjiang river, which connects with China by mid 2018, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said on Wednesday.
"Finally, all the necessary rulings by the Russian Direct Investment Fund and the Fund for Development of the Far East have been obtained," Sokolov told local Izvestia daily.
The idea of building the bridge over the river, called Amur in Russia, was agreed at a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg in 2013.
Designed with an annual cargo transport capacity of 21 million tons, the 2,215-meter bridge will connect Tongjiang Port in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province with Nizhneleninskoye in Russia.
The Chinese party has built its part of the bridge fairly quickly while the construction in Russia which was expected to end in 2017 has been delayed, the newspaper said.
The new bridge will cut the length of the cargo transportation route from the eastern regions of Russia to China by 700 km, it said.
