Mikhail Mishustin’s meeting with First Vice President of Iran Mohammad Reza Aref

The meeting took place as part of Mikhail Mishustin's official visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Mikhail Mishustin's opening remarks:

Mr Aref,

I am delighted to meet you. This is my first visit to Iran as Prime Minister. I would like to thank you and all our Iranian friends for their traditional hospitality.

Relations between Russia and Iran have many centuries of history and are based on the principles of friendship, good-neighbourliness, and mutual respect. Russia is sincerely interested in taking our cooperation to a higher level, giving it new meaningful content. These decisions were made by our leaders: President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader of Iran Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

We welcome Iran's fundamental decision to further strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia and fully share this sentiment.

We consider expanding our trade and economic cooperation and diversifying mutual trade and its structure a priority, and propose continuing our joint work to increase it.

Of course, we also believe it important to create the most favourable conditions to implement an entire range of large investment projects in various fields. These tasks must be addressed by the joint Permanent Russian-Iranian Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation. From the Russian side, it will be chaired by Minister of Energy Sergei Tsivilev.

We consider logistics and transport infrastructure to be the most promising area: Russia and Iran have great transit potential both in the Caspian region and Eurasia. We are actively developing international corridors. The North-South transport corridor connects Russian ports on the Baltic, in the northern seas with Iranian ports on the coast of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It provides direct access for all Eurasian states to the fast-growing markets of the Asia-Pacific region and Africa.

We also find our cultural and humanitarian cooperation of great importance. I know that recently there has been a growing interest in Iran in studying in Russian, in particular, in receiving higher education in Russia. Over the past four years, the number of Iranian students studying at universities in the Russian Federation has tripled and reached 8,000. We welcome this.

Our tourist exchanges also have great potential.

In particular, a decision was made to establish a visa-free regime for tourist groups, which made it possible to increase the number of our citizens travelling to Iran by 52 percent. Iranian tourists today can apply for an electronic visa to travel to Russia.

Mr Aref, we have a busy joint agenda. As I have said, there are many projects in the spheres of infrastructure, transport logistics, energy, agriculture, high technology, industry, as well as cultural and humanitarian issues. I propose we get down to discussing it.

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