President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Madame President, friends, good evening. We are very happy to see you.
We hope and are even confident that the BRICS summit will be successful. And we are very happy to meet with you on the sidelines of this event, to discuss our bilateral relations and promising projects.
First of all, I would like to note that our relations are developing quite positively and we are seeing regular contacts in nearly all areas, including in the parliamentary dimension.
Last year, our trade grew by 15% and in the first quarter of this year, we have seen a slight decline, but I am confident that our trade growth will continue.
We certainly need to do more in terms of investment cooperation; we need to work toward the possible use of national currencies in our trade and economic ties and continue work in the high-tech sectors, such as aviation and space exploration.
We are grateful to you that two Brazilian stations are already using the GLONASS system and now, we will agree on creating a complex for tracking space debris – an extremely important issue not only for Russia and Brazil, but for nearly all participants in international communications and those working in space.
Welcome, Madame President!
President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff (retranslated): Mr President, it is a great honour for me to be here in Ufa. Unfortunately, I was unable to come for the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.
I want to express my admiration of the level of preparation for this BRICS heads of state summit and I am confident that this meeting will be successful. I also feel that this seventh top-level meeting of the BRICS nations is a kind of watershed, because we are talking about the creation of a New Development Bank, as well as a Contingent Reserve Arrangement. I feel that we must do everything possible to increase turnover; its current level is insufficient compared to its potential. It is imperative for us to achieve the goal of $10 billion in turnover.
We must do everything possible to increase mutual investment and we are currently seeing a wonderful moment for this, because Brazil is implementing an infrastructure investment plan and we know that Russia has a fairly large number of companies that work on building ports and railroads.
In 2004, while you were serving as President of the Russian Federation, we established a strategic partnership and we are carrying out all our actions taking into account the priorities that were identified then. For us, one of the greatest priorities in our bilateral relations was trade cooperation, as well as mutual partnership in launching satellites.
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