I consider the decision of my colleagues and friends to be the best birthday present.

We can tell the general public that the gold and foreign currency reserves of the Central Bank are not designed to finance the economy, but rather to ensure foreign trade turnover. Therefore, we need this level to be able to provide the necessary foreign trade turnover for such an economy as Russia's for a period of at least three months.

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?

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.

We are marking the anniversary of the Arctic convoys.We really do consider members of the Arctic convoy to be heroes. This is true. I am not saying this as a fashion of speech.

The Chancellor [Angela Merkel] and the European partners would be well-advised to address the problems in eastern Ukraine more thoroughly. Maybe they have too many domestic problems of their own at the moment.

Yet our interests, the interests of the Russian Federation, include the normalisation of relations with Japan, which is not at the bottom of the agenda. The whole range of what will be proposed for a solution, the entire range of matters related to the normalisation of our relations and what that would bring after normalisation, this is the whole range of issues to be discussed and decided, and those decisions should be of a practical nature.