Moscow, November 6 – Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, living in exile in India, will visit Russia next week, media reports here said.
“The Dalai Lama is due in Russia’s Kalmikia region on November 13 and will stay until November 17,” President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Russia’s Buddhist dominated region was quoted as saying by Interfax.
Earlier, Moscow had denied visa to the spiritual leader under pressure from the Chinese, causing irritation in the Buddhist community living in Kalmykia and Siberia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was reportedly asked by the former Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, to ‘make a choice between the friendship of over one billion Chinese and a few million Russian Buddhists’, had publicly promised to resolve the issue of Dalai Lama’s Russia visit.
Buddhism is one of the four state-recognised ‘traditional’ faiths in Russia, besides Christian Orthodox Church, Islam and Judaism.
