Official website of the President of Russia

Документ   /

Current bilateral cooperation matters were the subject of discussion.

* * *

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Prime Minister, friends, good afternoon, it is a great pleasure to see you.

I know that you had a big, productive meeting with the Russian Prime Minister.

Russia and France have always had especially good relations, and France is one of Russia’s priority partners in Europe and in general.

We are happy overall with the way our partnership is going. As you know and no doubt discussed with your Russian colleague, our trade turnover did fall by slightly more than 13 percent last year, unfortunately, and there was a further 1.5 percent drop over the first half of this year.

In this context, these intergovernmental meetings are very timely and I hope that we will find the instruments that will help both sides to fix the situation.

But what I think is clearly positive in our cooperation is that our ties are quite diversified. We work together in the energy sector, in all areas – hydrocarbons, electricity, hydroelectricity, and nuclear energy. As far as our nuclear energy cooperation goes, we are working on the very latest technology, working together on a new generation of fast neutron reactors.

We are working together on space exploration and in the aircraft manufacturing sector. It is good that five launches have already taken place at Kourou, and 11 more are planned to take place soon.

I think our cooperation in the aircraft manufacturing sector is also very promising. We have a common product, the Superjet-100, and our Russian and French colleagues are working now on the new medium-haul S-21 aircraft.

Of course we have our traditional bilateral ties in humanitarian fields too. Our inter-parliamentary ties are developing. This is all happening on a regular and on-going basis, and makes us very happy.

Prime Minister of France Jean-Marc Ayrault (translated from Russian): Good afternoon, thank you for this meeting.

I am very happy to meet you and have this chance to talk with you today. I pass on friendly words from President Hollande, who you met with recently in St Petersburg at the G20 summit. Once again, we want to thank you for the summit’s excellent organisation. You have put in place the necessary conditions for a return to economic growth and for international financial regulation.

Together with my colleague Dmitry Medvedev, who I first met last year, we held the 18^th intergovernmental meeting, with many members of our governments taking part. You have just listed the sectors in which our bilateral cooperation is developing. They include space, aircraft manufacturing, the energy sector, and transport. This successful cooperation has already produced concrete results, including the Superjet-100. I think this is an excellent result to have come out of our work together. Another result of our fruitful cooperation is the Mistral-class helicopter carrier, which was just recently put into operation. This took place at Saint-Nazaire, which, incidentally, is the place where I was born.

I will not go into the details of each issue, seeing as you have already gone through many points in detail. I simply want to say that this is the second time now that Mr Medvedev and I have chaired this intergovernmental commission, and I am completely confident that our bilateral relations are very solid and lasting and have a big future ahead.

I discussed many different subjects with Mr Medvedev. We spoke about bilateral economic cooperation and its development, and we said that this needs to happen in a spirit of partnership. We are very happy to see the growing Russian investment in France. There are more and more joint ventures all the time, but we need to encourage even more Russian investment into France. It is for this purpose that we have decided to set up a high-level working group with the participation of French banks, in order to put in place favourable conditions for Russian investment in France.

<…>