Official website of the President of Russia

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President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev: Dmitry Anatolyevich [Medvedev], Russian friends,

Before beginning these talks, I want to offer my sincere congratulations on your recent achievements, in sports first of all — the victories of Zenit and the national ice hockey team — and also the launch of your new aircraft (I hope it will fly to Kazakhstan too). Dmitry Anatolyevich, may victory accompany you throughout your work.

I would like to congratulate you on your inauguration and say, on behalf of all the people of Kazakhstan, that your decision to make your first foreign visit to our country was welcomed very enthusiastically indeed. I think that this is a result of the work carried out over these last years with President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the relations that have taken shape between our countries, and the level of political ties we have established, and we can feel some gratitude for this. I think this is a historic moment for both of us. I think that nowhere in the world can we see such close and fraternal relations as those between Kazakhstan and Russia, as those between us and Russia and the CIS.

Relations with Russia have always been a top foreign policy priority for Kazakhstan and will remain so. Kazakhstan and Russia have as complete a package of bilateral legal agreements as is possible between two neighbouring sovereign states. And now, I wish you welcome once again and I give you the floor.

President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Thank you very much for your warm words and your congratulations.

Nursultan Abishevich [Nazabayev], Kazakhstani friends,

It would be hard for me to find any more words to describe the very close and friendly relations between our countries. This particularly close and trusting relationship, which has stood the test of time, is precisely what gives us the grounds for making such positive assessments of our ties. This was what motivated my decision to make my first official visit as President to Kazakhstan, our very close and friendly neighbour.

I think that we are never short of matters to discuss, but looking at the main items on the agenda, we have a large number of big economic and humanitarian projects that form the fabric of the relations between our countries, and the number of these projects is increasing with every passing year.

As far as the degree of economic integration between our countries goes, we are in the best situation. We speak the same economic language and the historical traditions and roots of our ties give our intergovernmental cooperation a special character and create a particularly high level of contact between our peoples in general. Thank you very much for your warm words of welcome and for your congratulations on our victories. We need victories, of course, sports victories too, but we also need victories in the important matters that we are working on together. The prosperity of our countries and our peoples depends to a substantial extent on the success of our work.

Thank you.