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President Vladimir Putin: Practically all the speakers spoke of the heightened attention, one could even say the extreme sensitivity, the public shows to any events taking place in the nuclear energy sector. Unfortunately, we must admit that the public’s concern is justified. We all, unfortunately, lived through the great catastrophe that was Chernobyl, and this has marked all our memories. We must draw the necessary conclusions from all of this and work in all areas, above all using our own efforts. The task of ensuring the safety of nuclear facilities is above all our own responsibility, and the relevant agencies, the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision, Federal Agency for Nuclear Power, the government in general, the law enforcement agencies, the special services and the lawmakers working in this area, must all work to ensure the prevention of any serious negative events concerning the safety of nuclear facilities.

We have many opportunities for working together in this respect. I am very grateful to the Governor of Murmansk Oblast, Yury Yevdokimov, for the work his working group has done on collecting all this information and formulating proposals to help us improve the situation in this area that is of such vital importance for the state and for all our country’s citizens.

As we have already noted today, we did achieve certain results in terms of major projects to develop the country, develop the state and the economy over the last few years. But this progress must go hand in hand with just as great an effort to ensure people’s safety. Our colleagues are right when they say we are not doing enough in this area, not doing enough in terms of action and in terms of providing information on our action. After all, where does this heightened public sensitivity come from? People do not trust the state agencies, at least not in areas where in the past the state has not behaved consistently, and I stress this point — on more than one occasion, . In order to win the public’s trust we need to prove ourselves open and careful and make our work more effective in such sensitive sectors as nuclear energy.

In this context, of course, our cooperation with our foreign partners is also of great importance, in all areas. This cooperation is just an auxiliary element for us, but it is of real importance and is an important part of our work in the economy in general and in the energy sector in particular, including in nuclear energy. It is still an auxiliary element of our work, however, no matter how important it may be, and the main responsibility for ensuring all the principles we have discussed lies with us, and this is what I want to stress above all.

Together with the working group we have drawn up a list of instructions for the government, have clarified wording of certain things and have added some instructions to the list today to take into account the proposals that were made here during this meeting. I very much hope that the government will execute these instructions in full. This is an area in which instructions given must be executed in full and to the letter. We do, unfortunately, still have some major issues that require separate examination.

Pyotr Sumin raised one of these issues today – the Mayak chemical plant. This is not the only pressing problem we have to deal with in this area. But if we concentrate our attention on the main sore points I am sure that we will be able to resolve these issues too.

I would like once again to thank you. I would like to congratulate the energy sector officials once again with their clear success and wish them all the best, and I would like to remind the governors present here among our colleagues that on December 24, we have a State Council meeting scheduled to discuss administrative reform and state management issues in connection with the law just passed by the State Duma. We have already spoken about this issue in depth and have discussed the main problems together. These discussions have been taken into account and were also reflected in the law passed by the State Duma. But I think there is still a need to come back to these questions again and clarify certain points that are of interest and concern to all of us and to think together about how we can implement the recently passed laws.

Thank you very much.