President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev: Mr President, I am happy to welcome you, the members of the Russian delegation and all our friends in Astana. You are making a state visit at my invitation and I believe this is a very important moment.
We have already had several bilateral meetings before this, and your state visit to Kazakhstan is a special event for this country. For us Russia is a strategic partner and ally. We are jointly operating within the Eurasian Economic Union.
In terms of bilateral relations, our countries are successfully implementing projects in the economic, scientific and humanitarian areas. Therefore, we attach special importance to this meeting. I am certain that it will give an additional impetus to cooperation between our two countries.
The current drop in mutual trade is understandable. We know this is a temporary development caused by the cyclic pattern of global development and the fall in the price of our energy resources – our export goods.
At the same time, we see the need to take rapid coordinated action both at the national level and within the EAEU. We need to use our reserves to resolve economic matters and use the advantages for the development of the Eurasian Economic Union.
We have mentioned today that the Eurasian Union can exist in conditions of equality of all its members and when our government officials feel they are international officials and work in the interests of all EAEU states and the overall economic policy.
For tomorrow, we have planned a meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of States and the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council. There we will go into the details of regional cooperation. Now we have a wonderful opportunity to focus on bilateral relations. We have covered everything in narrow format, now we can discuss it with the participation of our delegations.
Mr President, the floor is yours.
President of Russian Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much, Mr President,
Colleagues, it is true that we have covered a number of sensitive areas of our cooperation in narrow format. However, I would like to begin by saying that our relations are developing efficiently in all areas, bearing in mind our political cooperation, cooperation in security matters, in combatting terrorism and organised crime and, of course, our economic cooperation.
We are observing a slight statistical drop, but in physical volumes nothing has really changed. I would like to note that we are operating under a bilateral plan adopted in 2013, which ends in 2015. Our colleagues are now working on the next joint work plan for 2016–1018. We have sent a draft of this plan to our partners in Kazakhstan and hope that it will be approved before the end of the year.
I would like to say that despite the obvious difficulties, we continue enhancing mutual investment. Russian investment in Kazakhstan is growing and has already surpassed $9 billion.
Most of Kazakhstan’s crude oil shipped to external markets transits through Russia along the Atyrau-Samara and Makhachkala-Novorossiysk oil pipelines and the Caspian pipeline. We have many large interesting joint projects in high technology, industry, agriculture and energy sector. I am very happy to have this opportunity today to discuss all these promising areas of our cooperation in expanded format.
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