OREANDA-NEWS. Vladimir Putin held talks in the Kremlin with President of Ecuador Rafael Correa, who is in Russia on an official visit.

Following the talks, a number of agreements on cooperation in the energy and transport sectors were signed in the presence of the two presidents, including a loan agreement to finance the Termogas Machala thermal power plant project, a letter of intent on the implementation of hydropower and multipurpose projects, as well as a memorandum of understanding on the implementation of railway projects in Ecuador.

Vladimir Putin and Rafael Correa made press statements.

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PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Mr President, dear friends and colleagues, we are very happy to see you and welcome you to Moscow.

I am very pleased to welcome Ecuador’s President to Russia’s capital. Your country is one of our most important Latin American partners.

Relations between our countries are developing very successfully. Our trade is very decent: nearly USD 1.5 billion – USD 1.3 billion to be precise – and continues to grow despite all the problems in the global economy. It rose by more than 10 percent in the first half of this year.

We have a lot of promising, exciting projects, and today we’ll talk about all of them. I am very pleased to have this opportunity, Mr President. Welcome.

PRESIDENT OF ECUADOR RAFAEL CORREA (translated from Russian): Thank you very much, Mr President.

We are very pleased to visit Russia – a wonderful, great country – again.

Yesterday we visited St Petersburg, one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Who can forget such a terrible event as the Siege of Leningrad that lasted almost 900 days, where people preferred to die of hunger and cold rather than giving up or capitulating to Nazism!

And today we are visiting Moscow, a great capital. It is also a heroic city, a city that won the war against Napoleon and the Second World War. For us it is a great honour to be in such a heroic city, indeed in this heroic country. And happy circumstances make that it is also a country with many ties to Ecuador.

Russia is our third largest trading partner, among those not trading oil. We can also boast that Russia has made very large, significant investments in Ecuador. We have many beneficial projects which, in addition to creating profits for our countries, also further Ecuador’s development. And one example of such cooperation is a very important hydroelectric power plant called Toachi Pilaton.

Ecuador is a developing country. And while we really have done many things together with the Russian Federation, we are confident there is much more to do. We can work in our Gulf [of Guayaquil], in the southeast of the country, and develop mineral deposits. And there are many more things we can do together. I think that people’s skills, science and technology are very important, crucial for our relations, and in Russia much is available of the very highest quality. So I hope that during this visit we can deepen and improve our cooperation in these areas.

We can also improve our scholarship programmes, as well as programmes between our two cities of knowledge: Skolkovo in Russia and Yachay in Ecuador.

Mr President, thank you very much once again for receiving us with such warmth and cordiality. Thank you very much.