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.

It is true that the role of the state in the Russian economy may be too big today, but from the fiscal standpoint, it is not always practical to do this in a falling market.

Democracy is not possible without effectively working legal system.

If the world economy is divided into isolated economic blocs of this kind, it will be rather difficult to achieve the same interpretation and application of international rules of economic activity and world trade.

Another point is that ultimately, as far as the budget is concerned, of major importance is who offers more money during the bidding that must be organized as a part of the privatization process. In this sense, we cannot discriminate against any market participants, not one of them, but this is not relevant at the moment, as the Government has decided to postpone the privatization of Bashneft.

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.

Are we not concerned, for example, by the growing danger related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology? All of this poses a clear threat to the world, to the region. However, we have obvious points of convergence that are related to our interests.