On 23 March, a delegation of the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in the Russian Federation paid a visit to Voronezh State University. Among the members of the delegation were Dr. Habeeb Mtashar Abood, Attaché for Culture and Education, and Dr. Al-Haidari Basim Hasan, Deputy Attaché. On the part of VSU, the meeting was attended by Rector Dmitry Endovitsky, Vladimir Rodionov, Director of the International Education Institute, Associate Professor Yulia Zhidkova, Deputy Director of the International Education Institute and the Head of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language at the International Education Institute, and Mohammed Saadoon Jamil, Associate Professor at the Department of the World History and Oriental Studies at the Faculty of History.
Dmitry Endovitsky told the guests about the research and academic capacity of the university and also spoke about the partners of VSU. The parties discussed the renewal of bilateral cooperation between VSU and a number of Iraqi partner universities after a break caused by pandemic restrictions, professors’ and lecturers’ internships at the departments of Voronezh State University, and the issues regarding the education of Master’s and PhD students from Iraq at VSU. Foreign guests thanked the representatives of VSU for the assistance which Voronezh State University has provided to the Republic of Iraq for forty years, for training 80 PhD students and over 180 Master's graduates. They also emphasised the desire to strengthen cooperation with the university in various fields of science and education.
On the same day, a meeting between the members of the Department of General Linguistics and Stylistics and its PhD graduate, Dr. Al-Haidari Basim Hasan, took place at the Department of General Linguistics and Stylistics of the Faculty of Philology. In 2013, Al-Haidari Basim Hasan defended his PhD thesis “Culinary and gastronomic substantive vocabulary used figuratively" supervised by Professor Natalia Vakhtel. Al-Haidari Basim Hasan warmly remembered the years of study at the Faculty of Philology and said that it was at VSU that he became not only a researcher of the Russian language, but also a true teacher.
The Department of General Linguistics and Stylistics traditionally maintains close ties with the Iraqi graduates. Their works are published in the journals of the department and the scientific works of professors of the department are published in Arabic. For example, Tahsin Razzak Aziz, a PhD graduate of the department, translated into Arabic and published a text book by Olga Charykova, Zinaida Popova, and Iosif Sternin “Linguistics and Communication Theory Basics” (Dubai, 2018), a monograph by Iosif Sternin “Linguistic Manipulation Basics” (Beirut, 2018), and a monograph by Zinaida Popova and Iosif Sternin “Lexical System of the Language” (Beirut, 2019).
