President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr President, friends,
We appreciate that you decided to personally lead the Cameroonian delegation at the Russia–Africa summit in St Petersburg. This is your first visit to Russia, although we have kept in touch regularly over the telephone. Thank you for making the decision to come personally.
The ties between Russia and Cameroon are built on mutual respect and partnership. Next year we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. We hope that our meeting will serve as an additional impetus to strengthening interaction between our two countries. We are in favour of invigorating our political dialogue and expanding contacts at all levels.
Unfortunately, bilateral trade decreased slightly last year. Despite a decline in Russian exports, imports from Cameroon to Russia grew more than 17-fold. The main thing is to ensure the stability of our trade indicators.
We will continue to render assistance to Cameroonians who wish to study at Russian higher educational institutions; a total of 2,000 specialists have undergone training in our country. Currently, 814 Cameroonian citizens are studying in Russia, with 47 of them receiving state scholarships. We doubled the quota for Cameroonian citizens to 100 scholarships for the upcoming academic year.
We have noted that Cameroonians are interested in studying the Russian language. A centre of open education in Russian, which has over 150 school and university students, opened in Duale in April.
Russia and Cameroon have similar approaches to international issues. We stand for a polycentric world order, the principle of the rule of law, and rejection of dictate and double standards in international affairs.
We appreciate your support for a number of Russian initiatives at the UN platform. Overall, I believe that we have been working quite energetically and have achieved success on key tracks.
Welcome once again, Mr President.
President of Cameroon Paul Biya (retranslated): Mr President of the Russian Federation,
First and foremost, I would like to thank you for the invitation to this important summit between the Russian Federation and Africa. I would also like to thank you for the wonderful welcome. We enjoyed a very warm reception.
We are grateful to you for the excellent organisation of our work. We came here because diplomatic ties between our countries go back decades. You mentioned the successes in our relations, and we will discuss this further as well.
We came here in the belief that the summit will be an opportunity to strengthen friendly ties between the Russian Federation and Cameroon even further.
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