DND Report
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif is scheduled to visit Moscow from March 3 to 5, 2026. He has conducted more than 25 international visits since assuming office for his second term in March 2024, focusing on regional and global diplomacy as well as economic outreach, while carefully balancing relations between the Global South and the Global North.
Prime Minister Sharif assumed office in 2022, at a time when global media widely reported that Pakistan had been pushed into diplomatic isolation, with Islamabad maintaining almost non-functional relations with traditional partners such as the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. Since coming to power, Sharif’s pragmatic foreign policy has sought to maintain a strategic balance among China, the United States, and the European Union, while also extensively renewing outreach to Russia and Central Asia. Consequently, his forthcoming visit to Russia is being viewed as highly significant, with potentially far-reaching consequences.
The defining feature of Pakistan’s current foreign policy is that Islamabad has avoided ideological rigidity, placing realism over rhetoric and focusing on tangible economic gains from bilateral, trilateral (Pakistan–Azerbaijan–Türkiye), and multilateral engagements. It is widely acknowledged that being a “managerial statesman” is not an easy role, yet Prime Minister Sharif appears to have performed it effectively, qualifying as a functional and pragmatic statesman, particularly in foreign policy and crisis management.
His key destinations have included Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, China, Iran, the United Kingdom, the United States (for the UN General Assembly and IMF–World Bank meetings), Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Bahrain, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Sri Lanka, France (in multilateral contexts), and Egypt (for summit-level participation).
Diplomatic circles view the forthcoming visit of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to Moscow as a significant reset and deepening of Pakistan–Russia relations, with expectations spanning political, economic, energy, and regional-security domains, particularly the situation in Afghanistan, which has emerged as an existential issue for Pakistan.
Islamabad believes that Moscow can exert influence on Kabul regarding the presence of more than 20,000 terrorists in Afghanistan, as Russia is the only major power that has formally recognized the Afghan Taliban government, giving it relatively stronger diplomatic channels with Afghan leadership. Counterterrorism is also expected to feature prominently on the agenda, with Pakistan likely to seek greater Russian alignment in urging the Afghan Taliban to dismantle militant sanctuaries. Both countries have been victims of terrorism, as reflected in the suicide bombing at a Moscow railway station and the attack at the Moscow Concert Hall.
The visit also coincides with a rare and first-of-its-kind “Moscow–Islamabad Media Forum”, scheduled to be held on February 27, 2026. The forum is seen as a follow-up to the Russia–Pakistan Eurasian Forum 2025, held in Moscow in December 2025.
As a tool of soft power, media has long served as a powerful and effective instrument of the Global North, while the Global South has yet to invest proportionately in this domain. A clear example is that over 90 percent of news published in Pakistani newspapers or broadcast on television regarding Russia and Russian multinational contacts originates from Global North media agencies, such as AFP, Reuters, AP, BBC News, and CNN. Such coverage is often shaped by loaded narratives and is rarely free of bias.
This reliance illustrates how Pakistan and Russia remain indirectly connected, with the Global North acting as an informational intermediary. Even Pakistan’s state-run news agencies lack Russian-language services, leaving Russian-speaking audiences beyond their reach. Consequently, most Pakistanis learn about Russia, its policies, and its global engagements through Western media outlets, leading Pakistani youth to adopt perspectives on the Russia–Ukraine conflict similar to those prevalent in the West. Over the past five years, the conflict has consistently been framed using terms such as “Russian war” and “Russian aggression”, narratives coined and popularized by Global North media.
Therefore, Pakistan–Russia media engagement cannot achieve meaningful results unless media institutions in both countries engage in serious deliberations to develop a direct information-sharing strategy, eliminating third-party mediation by Western media hubs. Without this, media forums risk remaining limited to seminars, workshops, and conferences with little strategic impact.
