The Defense Ministers of Ukraine and Russia have signed a Plan for Bilateral Cooperation between their departments for 2004. The Defense Ministry press service reported that the signed plan would take effect next year as the principal document regulating cooperation between the two countries’ defense ministries.
Among urgent directions of military political and military-technical cooperation, the meeting of the CIS Council of Defense Ministers (in which the Ukrainian delegation took part as an observer) considered and discussed over twenty issues regarding the creation of a single defense system, in part, in the anti-aircraft defense sphere; the reform, modernization, and development of the armed forces; joint peacemaking activities and combating terrorism; along with solving the military’s social issues, especially those of military pensioners. The meeting also approved a plan for conducting joint events in the unified anti-aircraft defense system for 2004 and discussed implementation of the concept of a single geoinformation system for military purposes, to create a climatic information database, and exchange with climatic and meteorological descriptions between the corresponding services of CIS military forces.
Within the framework of the meeting Yevhen Marchuk and his CIS counterparts were received by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his speech president Putin said, in part, that a conceptual approach toward developing military cooperation between the Commonwealth states should be worked out for the period up to 2010. Putin believes that today it is important to have a clear plan of interaction between the CIS states in the military and military technical spheres. “We see considerable prospects in creating single defense complexes,” he said. Taking into consideration Russia’s interests, Putin dedicated a sizeable part of his speech to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO): “Not all of our colleagues present are actively taking part in this organization. This is nothing terrible. However, I believe that where they develop this work my colleagues can feel its positive results,” President Putin said, adding, “We are starting a transition to free education and cadre training for the CSTO member countries and selling our arms at our own domestic prices.”
