Official website of the President of Russia

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Vladimir Putin: First of all, I am grateful for the opportunity to meet and talk. We have not seen each other for quite some time. I remember your visit to Kaliningrad, and since then the dynamic of our relations, in my opinion, is quite satisfactory: our trade turnover is growing, and our political interaction is at a high level. But because there are many issues, and cooperation is developing well in very diverse areas, I think it is useful to make use of the opportunity that we have today to talk on all the entire range of issues of our cooperation.

Alexander Kwasniewski: Mr. President, I would also like the Polish press to hear this conversation. I am very happy that we can meet once more after the meetings in Moscow, Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg at the wonderful city anniversary celebrations. In my assessment, our relations are developing very well. The Warsaw book fair was held recently, and a large group of Russian writers attended. Polish readers were extremely interested in them. I also met them and had strong impressions from talking to them.

I want to express my gratitude that President Putin has invited me to visit Russia in September this year. I now have enough time to prepare for this visit, and give it a good political and economic content.

I want to express my happiness that we follow the same goals – that Polish-Russian relations should be exemplary and should develop into real results.

Vladimir Putin: The most important thing, which we discussed before we entered this hall, is that one of the key tasks is to do everything now to maintain the level of our cooperation in connection with Poland’s entry to the European Union. We have long-standing economic ties, and it would be grave mistake to lose everything that we still have in our cooperation in this area.

Alexander Kwasniewski: In recent years, there has been a growth of exchange between us. Our problem, our difficulty is that a major imbalance remains in these relations, a major negative balance for Poland. I think that the task for us and our governments is to arrange things so that as many Polish goods as possible appear on Russian markets.

Vladimir Putin: I absolutely agree with the Polish President. Over the last year, we achieved record figures of trade turnover, $6.3 billion. Growth came to 26%. But there is indeed an imbalance. As we know, it is connected to the growth of prices of energy resources. But I am absolutely convinced that we do not need to decrease deliveries of goods, but rather to increase them.

Alexander Kwasniewski: I completely agree with this approach.