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Prime Minister of Turkey Binali Yildirim is in Russia on a working visit.

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

 It is a pleasure to see you. Good afternoon.

I am pleased to meet you. It is a pleasure to meet and make your acquaintance.

I know that you have already held meaningful talks with Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. I am pleased to note that we are restoring our relations practically in all areas of our cooperation. However, due to certain circumstances – let us not mention them now – our trade has substantially dropped. I would like to hope that during your visit we would be able to make concerted efforts to overcome this negative trend.

I would like to ask you to convey my heartfelt greetings and best wishes to your President. We are grateful to him for signing the law ratifying our agreement on the Turkish Stream. This is just one of the major projects that we plan to carry out.

We have much joint work ahead. We hope your visit will lay the foundation for my forthcoming meeting with the President of the Republic of Turkey.

Welcome.

Prime Minister of Turkey Binali Yildirim (retranslated): First, Mr President, I would like to convey to you greetings from our President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I believe that today’s meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was very productive. We had a very frank conversation and discussed many issues. We agreed to take steps on the issues we need to resolve.

I am sure that this year, which did not go well for any of us, is over. We all know the areas where we will pursue greater cooperation. Primarily, this is the energy sector.

We carried out many projects in the past, for instance the Blue Stream. By implementing the Turkish Stream we will not only advance our relations but will also create a new route for Europe to receive energy resources.

Our work in the energy sector is not limited to this. In the nuclear power industry, we continue working on the Akkuyu project on a mutually beneficial basis. We discussed all the obstacles in the way of this project. Our minister talked about this with your minister, Mr Novak. We also discussed this with your Prime Minister. We agreed to take all the necessary steps.

At any rate, we want to launch the first stage of this nuclear power plant before 2023. We made this clear to our colleagues.

We also discussed other issues – agriculture, tourism, shipping, industry and investment in these areas. We discussed all of this.

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