Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.

We have created stability, which is a necessary condition for development. But I can't call this system authoritarian.

One thing is clear, everyone, no matter what their professional or material status, no matter what their influence on various state structures, must obey the law.

25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?

The Chechnya problem is a centuries-old problem. The thing is that today, fundamentalists and terrorists are exploiting those centuries-old problems to accomplish their own objectives that have nothing to do whatsoever with the interests of Chechnya.

Now they [NATO and the USA ] are sitting there, and we are talking about all these crises we would otherwise not have. You can also see this striving for an absolute triumph in the American missile defense plans.

In the area of international security, taking into account that the United States and Russia are the largest nuclear powers: We are ready to jointly work to strengthen the non-proliferation regime for weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. We are ready to work together, and much closer than before, on the problem of fighting terrorism, international terrorism, and here we certainly have vast opportunities.