Speaking at the closing ceremony of the 2003–2004 Russian-German cultural meetings in St Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin thanked the organisers and participants in this two-year-long marathon series of events.
Some 600 different events were initially planned as part of the cultural meetings programme but their number grew to around 3,000 over the last two years.
The two-year programme of Russian-German cultural meetings showed what a need there is for humanitarian projects and how useful they can be in developing cooperation and bringing peoples closer together.