Official website of the President of Russia

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President Vladimir Putin: Mr President,

Colleagues and friends,

Allow me once again to welcome you to the Russian capital.

We don’t need interpreters? That’s excellent. It’s further confirmation that there are no barriers in our work together. We are very pleased to see that not only have relations between our countries been restored, but that they are expanding very actively. Unfortunately, as the President and I noted during our talks one-on-one, we have not yet reached the level we had in the late 1980s-early 1990s, though the prospects for achieving this goal are clear ahead.

At the same time, we are very satisfied with the way our political contacts are developing and with our consultations on the international stage.

I want to repeat that the main thing for us is to develop our economic ties. We have good prospects, good projects in the form of large joint ventures, and we have plans for work together. I think that if we show the necessary will and administrative efficiency, we will not only take our bilateral trade back up to the levels we had in the late 80s-early 90s, but will go even further.

We are very pleased to see you and we are sure that your visit, Mr President, along with such a solid delegation of our Mongolian friends, will be a good impetus for all of our agencies to step up their cooperation in the areas of interest to us.

President of Mongolia Nambaryn Enkhbayar (speaking in Russian): Thank you, Mr President.

I would like to begin by thanking you for the very warm reception and hospitality that we have received right from our first day in Russia. Our journey here took quite some time as we went via Buryatia, Ulan-Ude, Novosibirsk and Elista. We saw just what a unique country Russia is and what diversity of cultures it possesses. But one thing that we all have in common is that all these different peoples here are as well-disposed towards us as we are towards them. We found friendship and warm feelings everywhere we went, and this made it very easy to find a common language. We discussed all manner of issues without any difficulties. There were no easy and hard questions, just normal business matters that we need to settle in order to take our relations to a new level.

And today, during my talks with you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, I think we had complete mutual understanding and I am very pleased with the one-on-one meeting we had.

Taking opportunity of the fact that we are meeting here in Moscow in the year marking the 85th anniversary of diplomatic relations between our two countries – 85 years over which we did indeed live together in many ways and laid the foundations and opened up the prospects that we can successfully build on today – I would like to note that your visit to Mongolia in autumn 2000, gave a great boost to our cooperation. It is no secret that our relations underwent a decline during the years when immense changes were taking place both here in Russia and in our country, in Mongolia, but your visit in 2000 helped us turn that decline around and encouraged new activity in the all areas in which we cooperate.