At the end of his working visit to Turkmenistan to participate in the Caspian Summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a press conference with Russian and Turkmen media. In an interview, he spoke about plans for industrial cooperation in the Caspian region.
He also announced the visit of a Gazprom delegation to Turkmenistan.
Here is the relevant excerpt from the transcript of the interview:
Vladimir Putin: I would like to congratulate Turkmenistan, the people of Turkmenistan, on such a good choice. The new President is a young man, energetic, with a brilliant education and already with experience in government activities. We have a good relationship. He took up the baton from his predecessor, his father. And we had a very useful, good conversation during his visit to Moscow. We have outlined a plan of concrete actions for the development of bilateral relations and have begun to implement it.
As for the former head Gurbanguly Myalikgulyevich, we have very good friendly relations with him. Thanks to his efforts, the basis for the development of Russian-Turkmen relations has been largely created, and cooperation continues, both through our energy companies, and in the humanitarian sphere, education, and transport. This is very important, logistics in the modern world is one of the most important components of economic success.
I should tell that after the official part, he invited us to an informal lunch, we had the opportunity to congratulate him on his birthday, of course, on his anniversary, but probably 90 percent of the time was devoted to informal, free conversations about the development of cooperation in the Caspian Sea region. You have heard almost everything about these directions, but there were a lot of ideas, proposals. Now I will not tell all this, because everything should be reflected in the relevant multilateral and bilateral instruments.
Of course, it was actually not only about energy and logistics, but also about industrial cooperation. Moreover, in such areas, which, of course, are of common interest to all countries, bearing in mind the main directions of our economic activity. We have agreed that we will choose these priority areas, distribute competencies among ourselves and, in accordance with these competencies, take steps to build broad cooperation in the main areas, primarily in industry and high technology.
In my opinion, this is very promising, it is important and advisable to pay more attention to this.
And in our traditional areas: in energy, in some other areas, there are also specific agreements, including on the continuation of some of our contracts. Gazprom’s management will soon arrive in Turkmenistan.
So, we are very grateful to the leadership of Turkmenistan for organizing this event. After such a long, so-called “covid vacations”, we finally managed to work with each other in full-format mode. It turned out to be very useful. Thank you very much.” ///nCa, 30 June 2022