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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Ms President, friends, please allow me to sincerely welcome you to Moscow.

I would like to begin our meeting by congratulating you, Ms President. Today is your birthday, so please allow me to sincerely wish you a very happy birthday. We are truly pleased that you are spending this day here and celebrating this occasion in our capital. We are very happy to see you.

Relations between our nations are progressing quite intensively: this is true of our international cooperation and our participation in actively-developing international communities such as  Background information BRICS BRICS; this is also true of our economic ties. In spite of the problems faced by the global economy, our trade and economic ties have been growing from year to year – both last year and this year.

Brazil is one of the biggest suppliers of agricultural products to our market. Among other products, it accounts for 41 percent of beef imports: nearly half of all the beef imported into Russia comes from Brazil.

But that is not the only area in which we are cooperating. We are also working together in the metallurgical industry and in high-tech sectors. Of course, we also have many other prospects.

We are happy to see you and your delegation, all of your colleagues.

Welcome!

President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff (retranslated): Mr President, I agree that our relations are strategic in nature. And it is no coincidence that we signed an agreement in 2010 clearly spelling out this nature of our relations.

I am very pleased to be here today, especially on my birthday. I would like to thank you for the lovely bouquet of flowers and thank the people of Russia for their hospitality.

Brazil and Russia are continental powers. Our populations are over 140 million people each. We have a great wealth of oil and other mineral resources, we produce big quantities of food. Our countries have great industrial potential which I think is a good foundation for further diversifying our relations.

I think we can further increase our trade. As you know, Russia is a supplier of fertilisers and commodities to Brazil while we export to Russia food products, including sugar. I think that we have very good opportunity to greatly diversify our trade structure and increase investments by Brazilian companies into Russian entities and vice versa.

Russia is a major oil producer and has world’s biggest reserves of oil and natural gas. I therefore think that at the moment our two countries have a task of strengthening our cooperation in trade and economy. We should actively promote investments in industry, in developing infrastructure, in energy and certainly in defence. Here I do not only mean weapons supplies but also a broad cooperation in the air and space sector.

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