The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale only the elites and nationalists of the republics gained.

There is also a huge potential for developing the aviation and space industries. As you might have noticed we have launched a new Russian spaceport in one of the Far Eastern regions.

Terrorism has once again shown it is prepared deliberately to stop at nothing in creating human victims. An end must be put to this. As never before, it is vital to unite forces of the entire world community against terror.

Unfortunately, the relations between the United Kingdom and Russia have not developed in the best possible way; however, it has never been our fault. It was not we who decided to discontinue relations with the United Kingdom; it was the UK who preferred to "freeze" our bilateral contacts in various fields.

This is not our job, but we always follow the actions of our European partners closely and we wish them luck.

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.

Anyhow, we obviously understand that, being a United States' ally and having a special relationship with it, the UK in its relations with Russian has to make an allowance for the opinion of its partner - the U.S. We take this reality as a given fact, but let me underscore once again that we will be ready to do as much as Britain will be ready to do in order to resume our mutual cooperation. This does not depend on us.