MUNICH, February 17. /TASS/. NATO and Russia have made some progress in enhancing military transparency in Europe, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a news briefing on Friday after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the margins of the Munich conference on European security.

" (...) on transparency, risk reduction we have actually been able to make some progress after our meeting here last year when Minister Lavrov and I met a year ago that was actually the meeting that enabled (...) 3 meetings of the NATO-Russia Council," Stoltenberg said.

" (...) I think that the meetings with Minister Lavrov and especially the meeting I had in this place actually a year ago has proven to be productive in the way that they have enabled us to move forward on the dialogue of NATO-Russia (...)," he said.

He said the two sides had also made some progress "(...) on briefings, on exercises, in December we briefed on NATO exercises, Russia briefed on Russian exercises and also we had a briefing on air safety in the Baltic Sea region in December last year, and now we had a process which is led by Finland with experts on air safety."

"And these are concrete outcomes of the work that we started here at the meeting a year ago and we are following up in the NATO-Russia Council," Stoltenberg said. "Hopefully we can make new steps following our meeting this time.".