E. VENIZELOS: I welcome you to the Foreign Ministry. You are an old and good friend of Greece, since your term here as Russian Ambassador to Athens, and I am pleased that twice we have jointly chaired the Greek-Russian Joint Interministerial Committee.
Our goal is to upgrade Greek-Russian relations, and our strategic partnership with Russia is of great importance to us.
We welcome as very important the recent agreement reached in Geneva, between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kerry, as a step towards political resolution of the crisis in Syria.
And I am very pleased that today we will be discussing the whole range of our relations: tourism, energy, investments, privatizations.
You are the ideal person to give a major boost to our bilateral partnership. And it is with great pleasure that I await my meeting with Mr. Lavrov in New York, in the coming days.
I am happy that we have a friend of your political level in Russia.
V. MATVIENKO: Thank you very much Mr. Venizelos. I am very pleased to be meeting with you here. It has been many years, but I remember very fondly the years I served as Ambassador to Greece. Since then, your country has had a special place in my heart.
You were right in noting that I feel myself to be a true friend of Greece, and I assure you that there are many people in Russia, at the highest political levels, who are sincere friends of Greece and are prepared to do anything they can for Greece.
We also consider you a friend of Russia, and we thank you for the initiatives you have undertaken, and we naturally hope that you will proceed to further moves in this direction.
We are close to the 185th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries. Naturally, this is an extremely important anniversary, and the long years of cooperation we have had are indicative of the profound relationship that exists between our countries and our peoples, as we are linked by very close, age-old spiritual ties.
We are very satisfied at the fact that recent years have seen an upgrading in the level of our contacts and collaborations on the highest political and state level, as well as on other levels across the range of our relations.
Motivated by the fact that it is precisely these strategic partnerships that are a substantial factor for stability in the Balkans and in the wider region, we think that the conditions have ripened for us to upgrade our relations to another qualitative level.
This visit from the Delegation of the Council of the Russian Federation contributes precisely to this upgrading of our bilateral relations within the framework of interparliamentary diplomacy and interparliamentary contacts.
I would like to point up another side of our relations: our multilateral relations; that is, through our participation in various organs of an interparliamentary nature, like the interparliamentary cooperation in the framework of the OSCE, BSEC, and the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy.
I have been instructed by the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Putin, to contribute precisely to the development of the bilateral economic and political relations between our countries on all levels.
I am also particularly pleased at the relations that exist between the Foreign Ministries. I convey to you the warm greetings of your counterpart, Mr. Lavrov, who assured me that he to is looking forward to your meeting on the margins of the 62nd UN General Assembly.
The stances of Russia and Greece are either close or identical on a broad range of issues. We hope that Greece, which will be holding the EU Presidency, will contribute from that position to expanding the cooperation between the Russian Federation and the European Union.
E. VENIZELOS: It is no mere coincidence that a portrait of Ioannis Kapodistrias hangs in the office of the Greek Foreign Minister. In addition to being Greece’s first head of state, he was also the foreign minister of Russia. This is indicative of our very close, age-old ties. Our ties are spiritual, cultural and, of course, political and economic.
I thank you very much for the message you conveyed on behalf of my counterpart, with whom I will have the great pleasure of meeting in a few days, in New York City.
We thank you very much for the message of friendship and cooperation that you bring on behalf of the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Putin. We know how important your personal role is.
We will capitalize fully on the six months of the Greek EU Presidency to upgrade relations on all levels – not just on the bilateral level, but also between the European Union and the Russian Federation.
September 16, 2013