Well I also want to say something to that topic. I am astonished that our internal law-making is of such great interest to foreign governments.
I hope our meeting will heighten your interest in the Russian economy,
I have heard this a thousand times. Of course every state has the right to organize its security the way it deems appropriate. But the states that were already in NATO, the member states, could also have followed their own interests - and abstained from an expansion to the east.
Nuclear weapons and other weapons are the means to protect our sovereignty and legitimate interests, not the means to behave aggressively or to fulfil some non-existent imperial ambitions.
If Russia's interests and security are threatened, Russia will resist. Everyone needs to know that.
Russia should be competitive, be able to protect its own interests and influence the processes that are important to it.
The thing is, however strange it may seem, that the interests of the United States and of the Russian Federation do coincide sometimes.
Just take Kosovo: back then, UN bodies decided that Kosovo should become independent of Serbia and that the interests of Serbia's central government had to be subordinated. You can read that in all the records, also in the German ones.
We should not forget either about the interests of the regular consumers who need the prices in supermarkets to be a little bit lower.
Therefore, let me reiterate that the rate should not meet the interests of a specific group or one or two groups, it should meet the fundamental development interests of the economy itself.