Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov and Chinese President Jiang Zemin met at a regional security summit in Kazakhstan's commercial capital Almaty, also attended by the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The five states signed agreement in 1996 and 1997 on cutting their armed forces on the long border between China and the former Soviet states as part of efforts to boost relations. ``This achievement is especially important in today's conditions, when nuclear tests in India and Pakistan have taken place against the background of their unresolved border issues,'' Primakov told the summit on behalf on President Boris Yeltsin.

Jiang, whose country and Russia have had several border conflicts in the past, said, ``China expresses its deep concern over tensions in the adjoining South Asianregion.''

Recalling that in 1994 China and Russia had agreed not to resort to nuclear strikes against each other and had re-targetted their missiles aimed at each other, Jiang urged renewed efforts to eliminate the new nuclear threat to the world.

``China, alongside the international community, is ready to make efforts to curb a nuclear arms race in Southern Asia to relax the situation in this region and preserve security in the whole world,'' he said.

``I want to confirm that China stands for the full banning and liquidation of nuclear arms, China is not going to resume nuclear tests,'' Jiang added. This week Yeltsin rang Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee urging him to sign the global treaty banning nuclear tests. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose vast Central Asian State still suffers from the aftermath of Soviet-era nuclear tests on its Semipalatinsk test site, joined his neighbours' condemnation of the latest nuclear tests. ``Unfortunately, we have to state that the nuclear club has defacto enlarged its membership. Pandora's box has been opened and the lethal weapons can now spread all over the world.''