Dmitry Medvedev held talks with Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova Ion Chicu.
Excerpts from the transcript:
Dmitry Medevedev's meeting with Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova Ion Chicu
Dmitry Medvedev: I am delighted to welcome you.
I am glad to have an opportunity to congratulate you on your appointment as Prime Minister of Moldova and wish you success. Working in the government is not an easy job. You know that too since you worked in government, however, a prime minister is a prime minister.
On the other hand, this is the first visit of your country’s prime minister to Russia in the past seven years. I hope it will give an extra boost to our relations in the economy, investment cooperation, and various cultural and educational issues. We will discuss all these issues. It is significant that you came on this visit literally immediately following your appointment. It is an opportunity to compare notes and look at our plans for the future, I mean Russia's unconditional interest in developing relations with the Republic of Moldova. I hope your country has a reciprocal interest in stepping up and enhancing these relations.
We have missed out on much in recent years, let us be honest about that, and I do not think it did any good to your country and opened up new opportunities. On the contrary, we wasted chances during those years. But I hope we will be able to recover missed opportunities now.
Again, I sincerely wish you success in performing the duties of prime minister of your country.
Ion Chicu: Mr Medvedev,
First of all, thank you very much for the invitation and for the chance to pay this visit to Moscow.
I was happy to accept your invitation not only because such a visit has not taken place in the past seven years and there was no comprehensive dialogue between our countries' governments. Not only because a large number of issues accrued that need discussing. And not only because there had been an agreement on a visit by the prime minister of the Republic of Moldova to Moscow, but it did not take place. The key reason is we are visiting Moscow literally on the fourth day of the new government by virtue of the closeness of our peoples, traditional friendly relations, and by virtue of having shared values, common history, the Orthodox religion, a common vision of the activities and development of our states for the wellbeing of our citizens, a common vision regarding investments and social policy, and so on.
I have arrived to restore dialogue between our governments on many aspects of our cooperation. A great number of problems have accumulated. But I think we can resolve the existing problems in a business-like honest dialogue and give a boost to trade and economic cooperation, and certainly to educational and cultural cooperation between our countries.
Thank you for the invitation.
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