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Russia's deputy PM against pause in Russian-German economic relations

Russia will certainly not stop supplying gas to Western Europe, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich stresses

BERLIN, April 02. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia attaches great importance to relations with Germany, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said on Wednesday at the Russian-German Raw Materials Conference in Dresden.

Dvorkovich said Germany’s government seemed “to have made a kind of pause” in German-Russian relations at the moment. However, the Russian government was ready to continue the dialogue “at any time”, he added.

Dvorkovich noted “we could not afford to make a pause” in economic relations given that these relations “have a direct impact on people’s lives in our countries”.

Gas supply

Russia will certainly not stop supplying gas to Western Europe, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said.

There will be no halt in gas supplies to Western Europe over the crisis in Ukraine, which is a key transit country for energy resources from Russia to the European Union, he said.

“Under no circumstances will we stop gas supplies,” Dvorkovich said.

“Russia continues to cooperate with Germany. There is no confrontation, but we have some differences,” he said, adding that “all Russian regions are ready” for cooperation with German businesses, including the two newly-adopted regions - the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol.

Horst Teltschik, the former national security advisor to Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the former chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said in his turn that “German- Russian relations are particularly important for a peaceful Europe”. He believes the two countries “should continue to develop economic cooperation despite tensions”.

“This will probably normalize the political dialogue,” said Teltschik, who is a presidium member of the Russian-German Raw Materials Forum, organising this year’s conference in Dresden.

Klaus Toepfer, the patron of the Raw Materials Forum from Germany, recalled that cooperation between Germany and Russia in the energy sphere “has a long history”.