When you start to meet with ordinary people you understand that a Russian person, really any person from Russia, a Tatar, a Mordvin, a Chechen, a Dagestani, they are very open people, even a little naive. But there's one defining trait that probably all peoples have, although it comes out especially strongly in us. That's a drive toward fairness. It's one of the dominating, I think, traits in the mentality of a person from Russia, a Russian person.

If anybody,wants to get rid of us, then this is a different approach. However, we will get over it; you never know who is going to lose more with such an approach.

We negotiated the construction of a gas pipeline system along the bottom of the Black Sea to Bulgaria. We signed certain treaties of a technical nature, contracts for laying the gas pipeline. And then Bulgaria created such conditions that the project's implementation became impossible, which was obviously against its own national interests. The former Bulgarian leadership was, in fact, aware of that and acknowledged it. But we trusted them when we were launching that project. We sustained losses amounting to millions, several million dollars. We would not want to get into such situations.

We have a professional relationship [with Chancellor Angela Merkel].2016 is the year of the German-Russian youth exchange, so the relations are moving on.

I believe that in fact it would be economically reasonable and logical to reach a compromise [on oil production], I am sure that everybody understands this.

We are expanding and improving the infrastructure of our relations. You must have heard about China's plans to participate in building a high-speed railway line between Moscow and Kazan in the Volga region, in central Russia. And then we plan to extend it to Kazakhstan and on to China.

Russia is probably one of the first countries to have been confronted with this problem of terrorism. It took some time before the international community realised the danger terrorism poses.