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The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev, Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino, Secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin, and Special Presidential Representative for Environmental Protection, Ecology and Transport Sergei Ivanov.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Colleagues, good afternoon.

Today we are holding a regular meeting of the permanent members of the Security Council, our current working meeting.

But before we start working as usual, I have a request for the leaders of the security agencies. You have probably already noticed that today a decision has been made to accelerate the procurement of official and other specialised vehicles by law enforcement agencies such as the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of the Interior, the Emergencies Ministry and others. I am asking you to be very attentive to this and carry out the procurement in a well-organised manner, in due time and in the right amount. If you need to make any additional decisions with regard to this, please submit your proposals. We will respond to them very quickly, without delay. This is my first point.

The second point concerns the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Our current work the Ministry is responsible for is proceeding properly – I am closely watching it and reading your reports. But I would like to highlight the need to help our civilian agencies such as the Ministry of Healthcare and other ministries to establish appropriate contacts with their partners abroad so that they can properly organise their cooperation in containing the coronavirus infection.

You can see from my telephone conversations with my colleagues from other countries that almost all of our partners express interest in working together and offer their services and options for cooperation, even in a variety of spheres. We definitely need to maintain this. But to do it effectively, we need the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I would like to ask you to organise this work.

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