Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Finland

Russia-Finland talks.

Joint news conference by Dmitry Medvedev and Juha Sipilä following the talks 

Excerpts from the transcript:

Dmitry Medvedev: We have had productive, wide-ranging talks. It is our fourth meeting. We met twice in St Petersburg, once in the Prime Minister’s home town of Oulu. This is the best evidence that the most diverse issues can be resolved bilaterally even at a time when the Russian Federation and the European Union have fairly complicated relations.

Finland remains our reliable and constructive partner. By joint efforts, we have reversed the downturn in bilateral trade from two or three years ago. Trade is now growing. This is a direct result of more intensive efforts.

In this case, we compare our relations with Finland to 2013 because mutual trade peaked back then. And we still have to get back to those numbers. The task we set ourselves is to make Russia Finland’s top trading partner again, as it was some time ago. We are currently in third place trailing Germany and Switzerland. The key role here belongs to business – both fairly big businesses, as well as small and medium-sized businesses. Indeed, Finnish companies are quite active in the Russian market. They launch new projects, which we greatly appreciate. The Prime Minister said Finland’s investments amount to 12 billion, but according to our data, the number is 14 billion. I don’t know where the other two billion got lost but I hope the numbers properly reflect the situation with investments. 

We have major partners such as, for example, the Fortum concern which is operating in Russia, carrying out a number of very significant projects. The construction of the Hanhikivi 1 nuclear power plant, a large Russian project in Finland, was mentioned here. We discussed it today, including schedule issues. An important benchmark is issuing the construction licence for next year. The work should be accelerated, though it is a commercial project, of course. And we expect the shareholders will be actively involved in this work.

I would like to thank our partners and Finland in general for the proactive position on Nord Stream 2. Work has been underway on Finland’s part of the pipeline since 5 September.

More to be posted soon…