Tianjin: Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday said Islamabad respects Moscow’s relations with New Delhi, as he met Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in China’s Tianjin.

“I would like to thank you for supporting Pakistan and trying to maintain a balancing act in the region. I know, and I must say, that we respect your relationship with India... and it's perfectly fine,” Sharif said during his talks with Putin.

He added, “We also want to build very strong relations... and these relations will be supplementary and complementary to the progress and prosperity of the region.”

The meeting comes just weeks after Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir visited the United States, where he held talks with former President Donald Trump.

Munir’s Washington trip followed India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’, in which the armed forces struck multiple terror hideouts and air defence sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The operation was launched in retaliation to the Pahalgam terror attack, where 26 civilians — including 25 Indians and one Nepalese, after profiling them as Hindus — were gunned down in front of their families.