7 Ежегодная большая пресс-конференция Part 7 В.Путин (V.Putin)

7 Annual Big Press Conference Part 7
February 14,2008
President of Russia V.Putin
The Kremlin,Moscow

POLISH TELEVISION: What will happen to relations between Russia and Poland if elements of the missile defence system are deployed in Poland? And a second question: many Poles are worried about Russias return to superpower status, given the historical experience. What can you do to assure Poles that a powerful Russia is not a threat to countries such as Poland?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: I do not think that we should heap ashes on our heads and turn to self-flagellation in an attempt to prove to all how good we are. Russia is not behaving aggressively and is not fixated on the difficult moments in the history of our bilateral relations. Russia thinks that we need to look to the future and draw on the positive pages in our relations, and this way we can expect success.
Concerning relations with Poland in particular, I would like to point out that we have not taken a single step aimed at creating difficulties in the relations between our countries. We have made no such moves. Yes, we decided to build a gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea. I do not understand how this could offend Poland. This is our gas and we want to sell it to our main consumers in Europe. We already built a gas transport system across Polish territory. We carried out this work together and we pay the transit fees on time and supply Poland with all necessary energy resources without any restrictions whatsoever. There have not been any interruptions. Indeed, in previous years, based on the take-or-pay principle, our Polish partners ended up taking less gas that what they had contracted for, and in principle, Gazprom had the right to impose penalties, but we did not do this and looked for other solutions to the situation. In other words, there have been no restrictions and we will not impose any restrictions in the future. But our position is that we need to diversify our supply routes for delivering energy resources to our main consumers. What is bad about this? Is there anything anti-Polish here? Why such a reaction? Where does it come from? To be honest, I was really quite surprised.
As for problems such as the meat imports issue, this is not a Russian-Polish issue. I discussed this with Mr Tusk [Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk] when he visited. This is more of an issue between Russia and Europe. The issue here is that agriculture in Eastern European countries receives large subsidies from European financial sources and produce is then dumped on the Russian market. This is stifling the development of our own agriculture sector. There are also some specific issues. For example, we are carrying out a national rural development programme and have been offering various incentives to the agriculture sector such as making loans available. Many agricultural producers have taken out these loans and now it is time to repay them, but to repay them they need to sell their produce and they cannot do so on the domestic market. We can either continue to toss accusations each others way or we can sit down at the negotiation table and sort out the issue, examine the motives behind our actions and take each others interests into account. In this sense, Poland could act as the conduit for our common interests in the European organisations. What we need to do is not trade accusations with Poland but join forces to protect our interests in the face of richer countries. We face a situation in which on the one hand we have the problem of subsidies and dumping of agricultural produce on our market, and on the other hand we see that the Polish authorities are not always managing to deal with the flows of smuggled goods coming in from Latin America and Asia, and we clearly have to respond somehow.
As I said, we need not to aggravate our relations but to look for solutions. I had a very constructive, businesslike and substantial dialogue with Mr Tusk and I hope that this will continue to be the case. As for the missile defence issue and so on, it seems to me that this issue is closely linked to economic concerns. I have the impression that someone is deliberately fanning an anti-Russian mood in order to create the moral and political climate for deploying these systems. If you stir up anti-Russian sentiment in Poland it will be easier to convince the public that they need some new weapons systems or other supposedly for their protection. In reality it is not clear where the threat is coming from. They say it is Iranian missiles that are the threat, but we all know that Iran has no such missiles.

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[Gamlet786]

ВОТ ВЫ ВСЕ ГОВОРИТЕ,ЦАРЬ,ЦАРЬ!

ВЫ ДУМАЕТЕ НАМ ЦАРЯМ ЛЕГКО?...

[aro9998z]

coolman ever on everything

[Orel347]

ВОТ ВЫ СМЕЁТЕСЬ. ВЫ ВИДИТЕ НА МНЕ ЭТИ БРЮКИ? ЭТО ПАСХАЛЬНЫЕ БРЮКИ. РАНЬШЕ Я ОДЕВАЛ ИХ ТОЛЬКО НА ПАСХУ,А ТЕПЕРЬ Я НОШУ ИХ КАЖДЫЙ ДЕНЬ.

[promlukasz]

basrard liar

[sostav]

колесников - удод.

[vana1002]

putin - pobeda