Official website of the President of Russia

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President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: Mr Prime Minister, I am very happy to make your acquaintance and to exchange views with you here at our first meeting; this meeting may not be as long as we might like, but it is nevertheless important. I would also like to sincerely congratulate you once again on your victory in the election, on forming a government, and on your appointment to the post of Prime Minister.

You are quite familiar with Russia. In my view, this is an important factor that should be conducive to strengthening relations between our nations and the development of cooperation, not only in humanitarian, trade, and economic areas, but in every other respect as well.

In turn, Russia is ready to discuss issues of bilateral agenda: from matters of general cooperation to the most complicated matters. And so, as they say, I am at your service. Let’s begin our talks. I think that this is very important for our nations.

Prime Minister of Japan Yukio Hatoyama (as translated into Russian): Mr President, I am very happy for this opportunity to meet with you. I would like to thank you for your recent phone call, immediately following my election to the Parliament and the Cabinet.

I would also express my gratitude to Russians for showing much interest to the Hatoyama name.

I would like to particularly emphasise that you, Mr President, have great intentions in improving cooperation within the Asia Pacific region. I fully agree with these efforts and would like to contribute my assistance.

Mr President, you said that you are ready to discuss any of our concerns, and I am very grateful for this. There is a territorial problem between our states, so we would like to see this matter ultimately resolved and a peace treaty made. It is important for our current generation to accomplish this. It is true that we have a fairly wide generational difference, but we would like for our generation to resolve this problem. We would like to create by doing so a new type of relations between Japan and Russia.