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President Vladimir Putin: Good Day, dear colleagues.

Today we will discuss a series of issues, and the effectiveness of our actions in the sphere of military and technical cooperation will to a large degree depend on resolving them. We will thoroughly examine the policy of military and technical cooperation and the activity of the key ministry in this area – the Defence Ministry.

The main requirement in this work is economic effectiveness, while observing our political interests and strictly ensuring security interests. I think that I do not need to explain to anyone, you all understand this, how important it is now to rule out any possibilities for terrorists to access modern weaponry and defence equipment. I suggest that we should examine separately the problem of security in military and technical cooperation, including its anti-terrorist dimension.

Essentially, I would like to say the following:

Firstly, today we are to analyse the activity, as I already said, of the main department in this sphere – the Defence Ministry. It carries out activity in this sphere in all areas, and carries out maintenance throughout the entire production cycle of military equipment – from development to utilisation. Furthermore, it is the Defence Ministry that trains foreign soldiers and specialists; it trains technical personnel in its institutes and at technical enterprises of the Education Ministry.

It should be remembered that the Defence Ministry solves its tasks in the conditions of the new structure of the ministry itself, and in the overhauled model of federal bodies of executive power as a whole. The statutes on the Defence Ministry and on the Federal Service for military and technical cooperation have been confirmed. This means that all the necessary organisational and legal conditions for effective continuation of work have been created. However, in the conditions of administrative overhaul, it is important not to allow errors and slips, or to lose the coordination and necessary level of interaction between all departments involved in this work.

The second item on today’s agenda is regional policy in the sphere of military and technical cooperation. As you know, over 50 of the world’s countries buy weaponry and military equipment from us to ensure their security, and to carry out peace-keeping operations under the aegis of the United Nations.

Work with several of these countries has specific features which dictate the necessity of conducting a balanced and far-sighted regional policy. I would point out: we have accumulated considerable experience, and we are ready to use it in widening the geography of deliveries, and bringing new partners into the orbit of military and technical cooperation. For us this is particularly important: I mean that, as we all know, the bulk of cooperation comes from our traditional partners — 2–3 countries. We need to widen the geography of our cooperation with other partners, of course not ignoring our strategic partners in the sphere of military and technical cooperation. Here we should also match the level of demands of the current day (we will talk about this in more detail later) – this concerns the quality of production, maintenance, repairs, and training of personnel, which I mentioned, and it concerns more flexible schemes of financing this work.