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The meeting was attended by Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov, Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergei Naryshkin, Director of the Federal Service for Military Technical Cooperation Dmitry Shugayev, Rostec State Corporation CEO Sergei Chemezov, Deputy Head of the Presidential Foreign Policy Directorate Igor Nagorny and Deputy Finance Minister Leonid Gornin.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues,

I suggest we discuss the current tasks for this year and 2020–2021 prospects, with due consideration for our 2018 work.

I would like to note from the very beginning that we exceeded the target for 2018 military goods deliveries abroad by two percent; this was made possible by consistently implementing the decisions we adopted at our previous meetings.

Financial indicators of military technical exports have been growing for over three years in a row now and have almost reached $16 billion. At the same time, we retained positive dynamics in the first five months of 2019.

Foreign currency revenues from the export of military goods soared by 45 percent, while the overall portfolio of contracts reached almost $54 billion, hitting an all-time high. Russia confidently takes second place on the global arms market.

Speaking of our tasks, I would like to note that the streamlining of financial, economic, organisational and other mechanisms of military technical cooperation is our key objective.

Apart from arms exports, including those of the most advanced models, we need to more actively upgrade previously delivered equipment, set up service centres on the territory of customer states, and reduce repair-service deadlines.

It is important to expand the successful cooperation experience in the field of manufacturing arms and military equipment. We need to continue implementing joint R&D projects and transferring Russian technology to customers wherever this meets mutual interests. We realise that many of our partners are seriously interested in this. We need to pay more attention to our partners’ wishes to establish their own defence industry.

It goes without saying that matters linked with strengthening the military technical potential of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and helping its member countries strengthen their defence capability require high-priority attention.

We need to consider new factors complicating our work with partners in the military technical cooperation sphere, including a tougher competition struggle and the increasingly aggressive use of unfair methods of political blackmail and sanctions, plus we need to respond adequately to them.

Therefore a new military technical cooperation strategy stipulating well-coordinated political and diplomatic, financial economic and technical measures has been drafted in order to more effectively organise our entire activities in the field of military technical cooperation with foreign states.

We have to do everything possible to preserve Russia’s leading positions on the global arms market. I suggest that we conduct a detailed discussion of this document today in precisely this context and specify various priorities and guidelines of further expanding military technical cooperation with foreign states.

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