Our help costs a lot

The reduction of the world prices on oil causes concern for the Russian management team. The burden of the foreign debts is very heavy for Russia and no one is going to facilitate it.

There will soon be a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russia’s Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. The top officials will discuss the problems of Russia’s foreign debt. This was said by Powell himself, who made a speech Thursday at the hearings in the senate committee for foreign affairs. In the words from Powell, he had a telephone conversation with Igor Ivanov October 26. The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry said during that conversation that the ministers of the economic sector of the Russian Government would partake in the meeting together with Powell on the threshold of the Russian-American summit in the USA. The Russian Government would like to make the foreign debt burden easier and one of Russia’s suggestions is a possibility to write off a part of the debt and aim the available funds at the programs for safe nuclear wastes storage in Russia, Powell said.

Russia is not going to help America in its anti-terrorist struggle only for altruistic reasons. Everything has a price and our help to America is not an exception. In the end we do not have to present our army bases to America as gifts.

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

AP photo: President Bush puts his arm around Russian President Valdimir Putin at the end of a joint news conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Shanghai, China