Queen of Denmark to receive Russia's Foreign Minister

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov who arrived in Copenhagen the day before on a working visit will be received on Tuesday by Queen of Denmark Margrethe II and will meet Prime Minister Anders Fog Rasmussen and Minister of Foreign Affairs Per Stig Moller.

As spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Alexander Yakovenko said, during the forthcoming talks it is envisaged to discuss the state and prospects of development of Russian-Danish relations in the light of the upcoming visit by president of Russia Vladimir Putin to Denmark.

The priorities of Denmark's presidency in the European Union in the second half of 2002 and the complex of Russia-EU relations will be a theme to talk of throughout the discussions. Life support of the Kaliningrad Region (a Russian enclave in the west) in conditions of the EU's expansion is the central question for Moscow in this connection.

The EU stands for necessity to introduce a visa regime for all kinds of trips by inhabitants of Russia, including transit through Lithuania and Poland, and to carry out transit transportation, both of cargoes and people, by the European Union's standard rules of international transit. By contrast, the Russian side insists on preserving unhindered movement of people and cargoes from the Kaliningrad Region to Big Russia and in the opposite direction.

"We reckon on constructive interaction with Denmark in search of an acceptable decision and to prevent emergence of new dividing lines in the Europe of the 21st century," Yakovenko emphasized.

Though Russia and Denmark hold similar views on most of the questions of international and European politics, there are questions on which the points of views of Moscow and Copenhagen do not coincide. In particular, Moscow does not understand the logic of the actions of the Danes who intensively lobby entry of the Baltic countries into NATO. Copenhagen's approaches to modernisation of the radar station at Thule (Greenland) and its use in the NMD system of the USA require additional explanations. One more theme of the Russian-Danish dialogue is the violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population, specifically in Latvia.

The prospects for trade-economic and investment cooperation is an important theme of the talks. Despite the general positive dynamics, such problems as the narrowness of the assortment of products, the raw-materials orientation of trade and low investment activity have not been overcome yet. Besides that, as Moscow believes, it is necessary to speed up the coordination of a number of bilateral documents, first of all of an agreement on cooperation in combating organised crime."We are ready to continue the concrete talk on all these questions," the spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed.

After the end of his visit to Denmark Igor Ivanov will fly to Canada where he will participate in the meeting of the G-8 Foreign Ministers slated to be held in Whistler on June 12th-13th.