President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev: Dmitry Anatolyevich, I am genuinely glad of your visit. As we agreed in Bishkek, we are holding this informal meeting, and this is something we agreed to do on a regular basis. This has been a difficult year. A shadow was cast over this last month by the death of Patriarch of All Russia Alexy II, who I personally knew well. He had come to Kazakhstan and we had built up relations in this area. This is a great loss of course.
As for our meetings, in Russia and in Kazakhstan, we are meeting for the sixth time this year, I think, and this shows our good relations and our desire to make our ties stronger. Despite the difficulties this year has brought, our bilateral trade over the first ten months rose by 24 percent and came to more than $17 billion, and this is a sign that things are going ahead as normal.
We have carried out our bilateral cooperation programme for 2007–2008. Today we will sign a document on cooperation for the coming two years, and also a document on long-term strategic cooperation.
You have your 2020 programme, and we have our 2030 programme. Our foreign ministries and experts are working on the 10-year long-term cooperation programme.
I say all this to emphasise the point that there is no alternative to the strategic cooperation and alliance between Kazakhstan and Russia. We can overcome the global financial crisis only through regional integration – not just global integration but also regional integration.
I also welcome this opportunity to discuss with you the three issues we outlined. The first issue is security within the CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organisation] framework. Second is to consult with our colleagues and partners on the issues arising from the global financial crisis, and third, we will look at the next steps to take to strengthen the integration between our countries.
I think this will be useful for all of us. The special properties of this place, Borovoye, or Burabai, as these mountains are called in Kazakh, were discovered by the great traveller Semyonov of Tianshan, who first described the curative effects of this region. These granite cliffs and the pine trees growing here give off a particular fragrance. Here in these woods you have absolutely pure and clean air, 100 percent oxygen. I hope that this place will give you and our other colleagues the fine impressions and good sleep we all need to help put us in the right mood for seeing in the New Year.
President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Thank you, Nursultan Abishevich.
First of all, I want to thank you for the invitation of course. We did indeed agree to meet towards the New Year in hospitable Kazakhstan and talk about how the year has gone. To speak frankly, you are right: the year has not been easy. It has not been easy for our countries and it has not been easy for the international community in general. It is probably not time yet for summing up, but it is already very clear that a number of events have placed this year among the more dramatic years of recent times. Nevertheless, our countries and economies have continued their steady growth and you and I have met regularly.
My first visit this year was to Kazakhstan. We met in Moscow, and we met here in Kazakhstan and in other places too. We constantly exchanged views on events and on how cooperation between our countries is developing. I think that this was not time wasted. You mentioned our bilateral trade figures, and they are indeed very good, higher than at any time before. I think that even at this time of economic difficulties we can keep the pace we have set next year too, despite the considerable problems with economic growth in the world. We will try our hardest and do all we can, at any rate.
We have promising plans for the future. You rightly said that we have the desire to build up our cooperation and strengthen our strategic partnership. I think that this plan, which we will sign in just a few minutes, gives concrete form to the general agreements between our countries and action plans for 2009 and 2010. It does indeed set out all the important positions on which we reached agreement recently, during my visit and also during our inter-regional forum, where we discussed these matters with the governors too. This document sets out activities related to inter-regional cooperation, and also consolidated positions. If we follow this plan I am sure that we will be able to maintain the pace we have set in these last years. This is very important because, as you rightly said, our countries are very close and their economies are genetically interdependent. This has long been the case and this means that bilateral cooperation is very important for us. Now that many international processes have come to a standstill and there is a global crisis of confidence in the financial sector between important partners and close countries, our relations need to be more fully-fledged than ever, and we in Russia will do everything possible to ensure their continued development.
You have chosen a wonderful place for meeting, for discussing our bilateral matters and for multilateral discussions, for looking at the prospects for collective security within the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and discussing integration too. Just recently we had a meeting of heads of government, and I think more than 20 agreements were approved.
Nursultan Nazarbayev: Yes.
Dmitry Medvedev: In principle, there are very real prospects for finally drawing a line in this lengthy integration process and starting on new steps forward.
Nursultan Nazarbayev: I wanted to say too that we are close to establishing the customs union between three countries: Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Twenty documents and laws have been approved and in March the remaining 12 should be approved. By April we should be able to establish the functioning integration grouping we sought. Through free trade and the customs union and so on we are going through all the same stages that such important groupings as the European Union went through.
Our Government recently gave the Russian Government a full briefing on what we are doing, because we are concentrating above all now on direct support for our manufacturers rather than to the banks. We are doing this and we are looking too at what Russia is doing. We have matters to discuss together, and we need to act together. The times make this necessary.
Dmitry Medvedev: You are absolutely right. We were in contact before too, discussing our results and whatever problems came up. But now we do indeed need to coordinate many different areas, as we discussed, including macroeconomic policy matters, because these are things that have a direct impact on the well being of our closely bound economies.
Nursultan Nazarbayev: It will also have an impact on the social climate in Russia and in Kazakhstan.