OREANDA-NEWS. April 1, 2009. The Russian delegation at the talks included Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, Presidential Aide Sergei Prikhodko, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin. The U.S. delegation included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor James Jones, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Mr Medvedev and Mr Obama adopted two joint documents on developing Russian-U.S. relations and further talks on strategic offensive arms reductions. They also made statements for media.

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: I would like to thank President Obama most sincerely for this chance to meet, get to know each other, share our views on the current situation in the world, talk about the values that unite us, and discuss how we see the future of Russian-American relations.

I cannot but agree that over these last years, unfortunately, our relations have encountered difficulties and, as the U.S. President just said, they were drifting in the wrong direction. Our relations were worsening, and this was not in the interests of the United States of America, nor the Russian Federation, nor indeed of the planet as a whole.

We have agreed to try to reset our relations and open a new page in our ties. This is important given our joint responsibility for the processes taking place.

Today, we discussed practically all of the issues of concern to our countries: non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, strategic offensive arms reductions, counter-terrorism issues, and the question of building a more stable global economic order, and this demonstrates just how important it is for us to talk, and just how important are the decisions we reach.

This is only the start of our discussions, but I think that today’s meeting has already shown that there are far more issues that unite us than issues that take us in different directions.

I agree with President Obama that our teams have done some good work. The two declarations that we adopted today show progress in the areas we have been talking about. The declaration on strategic offensive weapons and the declaration on the general framework for Russian-U.S. relations reflect our current positions, and it is important that they have been approved.

I will be very pleased to see the U.S. President and his team in Russia this July. July is the warmest month, and I hope that this warmth will extend to the talks that we will have. We have agreed on a number of specific matters that we could work on in preparation for this meeting, and I hope that we will not lose time now and will indeed get this work underway as was discussed today.

We will continue our contacts, all the more so as we discussed today not just important international issues but also bilateral matters. We even talked a bit about legal education, not perhaps everyone’s favourite subject, but it can actually make a very useful contribution to developing our bilateral relations, for it turns out that in our time we studied the same books.

I have an optimistic view of the future of Russian-U.S. relations after this meeting. I would like to thank once again my colleague, President Obama.