Official website of the President of Russia

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The agenda of the meeting included topical issues in bilateral relations.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Prime Minister, colleagues,

I am very happy for this opportunity to speak with you on the sidelines of the APEC summit.

New Zealand is our long-term partner in the Asia-Pacific region and I would like to thank you for your help and support in preparing for the APEC summit this year.

Mr Prime Minister, I hope you will soon be visiting Moscow. You know about our invitation, I would like to renew it once again.

Our specialists are working on strengthening the contractual legal framework of our cooperation. I hope that we will make progress in several areas that are of mutual interest to us.

Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key: Mr President, I want to congratulate Russia on your accession to the WTO and the tremendous gains for the people of Russia.

I want to congratulate you on this marvellous facility and the foresight of the Russian government for building such an amazing facility for the young people and their education, and to have APEC leaders coming here to see this facility to operate for APEC and then for its future use to be of such great importance to your country.

We are enjoying the conversations over here at APEC and we thank you for making time for this bilateral meeting. I know we are running very late and we appreciate you taking this opportunity given the pressures on your time.

So we look forward to coming to Moscow, and hopefully we can do that in 2013. We are interested in discussing the progress we are making with our free trade agreement and the steps we need to make to complete that deal.

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