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The Federal Law On Ratification of the Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of Australia on Cooperation in the Use of Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes was signed by Dmitry Medvedev on July 1, 2010.

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President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Madam Prime Minister, I am very happy for the opportunity to meet you.

Your predecessor and I had some active meetings and consultations, and I hope that we will be able to continue this tradition, because it serves the interests of both our nations.

And in opening a new page, so to speak, we have a major event today: the exchange of instruments of ratification of the Agreement that has been prepared and adopted.

From the moment we exchange these instruments, the Agreement will enter into force. And we will be able to do this in Seoul, which is not a common diplomatic practice, but it looks nice.

I sincerely greet you again and would like to begin our talks.

PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA JULIA GILLARD: Thank you very much and thank you for agreeing to see me.

I think we wanted to meet with you because we believe that cooperation is increasing so much in multilateral forums, not only here at the G20, important as that cooperation is, but also of course in the East Asia Summit.

We were very pleased to see Russia move to join the East Asia Summit, we are very pleased to support that, and we look forward to you participating as a full member from next year.

We are also very much looking forward to increasing our cooperation through APEC as we move to your hosting it in 2012.

I do think that with the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement that we will exchange today, that that is a symbol of taking our relationship to a new stage, and we are very much hoping to build on that for the future.