President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Yesterday we dealt with defence procurement and I hope there will be progress with it. Today we’re meeting at a session of the Commission for Military Technology Cooperation.
There are a number of issues on our agenda and of course some of them have to be discussed in camera, but all the same I’d like to unveil some topics.
We are here to discuss the possibility of educating foreign military experts in the Defence Ministry educational institutions. Of course this is an essential subject for the operation and maintenance of our own technology. Most importantly, however, it is an opportunity for our partners to enhance their career potential and thereby increase their defence capabilities, and for Russia it provides tremendous opportunities to promote our products in overseas markets and strengthen our relations with these countries. For these reasons I think that this topic is a very useful one indeed.
Let’s think about what has to be done so that our colleagues can receive a high quality education and so that we can have additional opportunities to promote our technology.
There is another issue, namely the joint development and manufacture of military products. This is also an interesting aspect because today we are far from being able to produce all items used in military technology cooperation by ourselves, though we have very good potential to do so. Nevertheless, cooperation is always necessary – it represents an opportunity to adapt our products to the requirements of foreign customers and, ultimately, exchanging ideas is never superfluous. Therefore this is one of the most promising forms of cooperation, especially during a crisis as it can reduce expenses and enhance our scientific and technological relations. For this reason our challenge is to convert this kind of work into a practical framework and to engage in partnerships in a number of fields. This is, incidentally, the meaning and context of the development of our relations with CSTO member countries. As you know, this week we will hold a CSTO summit and we will talk about this issue.
We have seen good examples of such cooperation with a number of different countries and there are rather large projects that have worked out quite well, but to this point this remains a new form of cooperation.
Let’s discuss this along with other issues.
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