Meeting with President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon 2014-09-11 21:50:00 Dushanbe Vladimir Putin met with President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon. The meeting was held on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Dushanbe. President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon: Mr Putin, I am very happy to meet with you. Dushanbe is hosting the SCO summit these days. Naturally, this is a good opportunity to discuss what our organisation has done and what we can improve within the SCO framework for our peoples and our nations. At the same time, this is a good opportunity to discuss our bilateral issues as well. I think we have accumulated a fair number of them, but these are good topics, issues of growth and development in our relations. So I am very happy about our meeting and would like to first hear your thoughts on this. Welcome. President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much, Mr Rahmon. I know that a great deal of care and work is involved in organising this major event. And we can see that you have prepared for it and are conducting it brilliantly – in any case, we can see the brilliant beginning of our talks in expanded format. Thank you very much for this. As for bilateral relations, they are developing quite successfully; based on the results for January-July of this year, we are expecting our trade to grow by more than 60%. Naturally, this is an impressive indicator. But we will discuss it now in detail. We certainly have things we could work on more to improve these indicators. Our inter-parliamentary ties are developing, and we have some progress in the humanitarian sector as well. We view Tajikistan as a very close partner and ally. These are not just strategic relations; they are allied relations. We greatly value this and intend to continue working in the same key. <…>