I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

We had a very good situation in 2005. The common budget had a volume of 80 billion dollars per year. Thousands of jobs were created in Germany by Russian investments. At the same time, a large number of German companies invested in Russia. There were countless cultural and social contacts.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is controlling this, the sanctions against Iran are lifted - but still the US are working on their missile defense system. What is the point of this?

President Obama hasn't been elected by the American people in order to be pleasant to Russia.

Concerning our possibilities on the international financial markets, the sanctions are severely harming Russia. But the biggest harm is currently caused by the decline of the prices for energy. We suffer dangerous revenue losses in our export of oil and gas, which we can partly compensate for elsewhere. But the whole thing also has a positive side: if you earn so many petrodollars - as we once did - that you can buy anything abroad, this slows down developments in your own country.

A very interesting and promising cluster has formed here [in the Russian Far East ], and we would be happy if our potential investors, our counterparts from abroad, first of all those from the Asia-Pacific region, knew more about it.

The path towards a free society has not been simple. There are tragic and glorious pages in our history.