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President Vladimir Putin: Good day, ladies and gentlemen.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome to Moscow our guest, the President of Vietnam Tran Duc Luong. We see this visit as an important step in the development of our bilateral relations. Our relations have traditionally been friendly and mutually beneficial and I am sure they have a bright future ahead of them. The results of the talks that took place show that our countries have the firm intention of continuing our dialogue in a spirit of openness and trust, and of strengthening the strategic partnership that we have built up over the years. One of the main subjects we discussed was economic cooperation between our two countries.

We also discussed today the measures we can take to improve the level, quality and scale of our business ties. In this respect we looked above all at cooperation in the fuel and energy sector. The undoubted leader in this sector remains our joint venture, Vietsovpetro, which achieved a good output level of 13 million tons last year and has produced a total of more than 130 million tons over its existence. We also have good cooperation prospects in the electricity, machine-building and agribusiness sectors, in construction, telecommunications and in developing transport infrastructure. We place a lot of importance on developing our relations in the high technology sector, in scientific work and in training specialists. We also spoke about state support for developing our business contacts. We are pleased to note that humanitarian contacts are also developing and we will take serious and decisive steps to support this development.

During our meeting, the Vietnamese President and I also exchanged views on the main issues on the international agenda today. These include strengthening stability and security in the Asia-Pacific region and in the world in general, the fight against terrorism and other subjects. We are happy with the high level of cooperation and mutual understanding that we have in how we see and take decisions on today’s major international issues. Our positions are either close in this respect or practically coincide.

In conclusion, I would like to underscore in particular that the results of our talks today show that Russian-Vietnamese relations are developing actively and will continue to pick up the pace in the future. I would like to thank our colleagues and above all the President of Vietnam for their work today.

Tran Duc Luong: As you all know well, the peoples of Russia and Vietnam have very good and close ties of friendship and cooperation in every area – economic, political, cultural and humanitarian ties. In 1994, we signed an agreement on the basic principles of relations between the Russian Federation and Vietnam. This year marks the tenth anniversary of this agreement. We are actively exchanging delegations, including at the highest level, in order to foster further development of all-round cooperation between our countries. We particularly note that in 2001, the first year of this new century, President Vladimir Putin made a state visit to our country and this became an important milestone in the development of our bilateral relations. Since that historic visit took place our relations have been steadily intensifying and this confirms that the leaderships of our two countries have chosen the right course.

I would like to express my special gratitude to President Putin for giving the delegation and I the opportunity to visit Russia. The Vietnamese people follows closely the situation and events in Russia and is happy to see the positive changes taking place in all areas of life here. These are very important changes.

Vietnam follows an independent and open foreign policy strategy aimed at being friends and partners with all countries that seek peace and cooperation, but we place great importance on cooperation with the Russian Federation as Vietnam’s traditional major strategic partner.

We are very pleased that the talks that just took place gave us the opportunity to carry out a detailed and far-reaching analysis and to exchange views on all the issues of mutual interest to us. This will give our cooperation even greater impetus.

While we consider foreign policy cooperation to be of great importance for our two countries, we also emphasise the necessity of developing trade and economic cooperation. We examined possibilities for working together on major projects that, I think, have very good prospects indeed.

Allow me, on behalf of myself personally and all the members of our delegation to once again thank President Putin for his reception and also to thank the media for covering our visit. I wish you good health and success.