OREANDA-NEWS. December 24, 2009. Sergey Lavrov: We have just finished a long conversation with the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt. During this conversation, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit and I informed the President about the outcome of the fifth round of the strategic dialogue between our countries, which we held yesterday. We confirmed that we had made progress along all the directions set forth in the Treaty on Strategic Partnership, which was signed on June 23 this year in Cairo during the visit of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev to Egypt.

Our economic ties are developing steadily. Unlike many other Russia's partners, our mutual trade with Egypt has grown rather than declined despite the crisis. Today we have agreed to continue searching for new areas of cooperation. We will discuss this topic in detail this week in Cairo during the visit of the co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation from the Russian side, the Minister of Industry and Trade of Russia Victor B. Khristenko, who will meet here with his counterpart – the Egyptian Minister of Industry and Trade Rachid Mohamed Rachid.

As for the international issues, our strategic dialogue focused primarily on searching for ways to break the deadlock in the Middle East settlement. We have agreed that now it is of utmost importance for everyone who can exert any influence on the situation to get together and discuss where we all are. Unilateral actions or initiatives no longer yield results. What is needed now is genuinely collective work. Basically, this conclusion is true for any regional situation that we have discussed yesterday and today. This is true for the situation with Iran's nuclear program, the stabilization of Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. Here we witness a very important desire of the States of the region to play a leading role in searching for solutions rather than rely on advice from beyond.

Of course, it requires active support of these efforts by the international community. However, the extra-regional players should show more respect and listen more attentively to counties of relevant regions. Russia strives to act this way. Specifically, we have been consistently supporting Egypt's leading role on a number of regional issues, first of all – and I would like to emphasize it – the efforts of Cairo aimed at restoring the Palestinian unity. Today, this is one of key issues to respond urgently.