St. PETERSBURG, July 7 (Itar-Tass) - Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin plans to make a trip to France in October for holding talks with the French government officials in a bid to formalize new approaches to collaboration in defense-related technologies.
“I hope to visit France in October and to attend the floating of the first Mistral /The Vladivostok/ helicopter carrier built for Russia,” he said in an interview with Itar-Tass on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Naval Show.
“Actually speaking, this will be a good pretext because the real reasons for going there is to hold meetings with French government officials for formalizing a new approach that we initiated at Le Bourget and reaffirmed here in St Petersburg,” he said.
“We’re going over to a new phase of collaboration with manufacturers of naval defense technologies and naval weaponry systems,” Rogozin said. “This phase of cooperation implies the setting up of joint design bureaus and joint engineering panels or, in other words, a novel joint research and development, as well as manufacturing with the subsequent sales.”
“That’s the most interesting way of action for us,” he said.
“For the most part, collaboration in defense technologies is based on the buy-and-sell formula,” Rogozin said. “For instance, we order something from them, like the Mistral, then acquire a new competence in large-block assembling /through manufacturing of aft sections of ships at the Baltiyskiy Zavod shipyards/, yet we purchase the Mistral all the same as a ready defense product of foreign manufacture.”
He said that a proposal on joint designing manufacturing and sales of products was handed to the French side at the aerospace show at Le Bourget where the chairman of the Russian government’s Council for Defense Technologies, Dr Yuri Mikhailov, had talks with his French counterpart supervising the armaments programs of the French Defense Ministry.
“We agreed then to set up a workgroup that would determine the needs of our two countries and would establish who’s ‘cooler’ and stronger in the sense of technologies and fundamental applied research,” Rogozin said.
“Once we define the needs of this kind, we’ll be able to make arrangements regarding future work then,” he said.