Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s new prime minister who assumed the post on October 14, believes that maintaining good relations and cooperation with Moscow should become a priority of his government’s policy towards Russia, the premier told TASS on the sidelines of the COP climate conference in Glasgow, Trend reports.
When asked about his government's priorities in relations with Russia, he replied: "it will be to maintain good, stable and predictable neighbor relations."
"It will be to develop our bilateral exchange and in particular take responsibility as coastal states in the Arctic. The Arctic requires coastal states to take responsibility together and with my former colleague foreign minister Lavrov (I met him last week) we agreed to take forward cooperation in the Arctic on bilateral level, but also in the Arctic and Barents context," he said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Oslo last week to take part in a ministerial meeting of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council. During his visit, Lavrov met with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store to discuss relations between Moscow and Oslo, and a number of international problems in the context of cooperation within the United Nations Security Council. He also met with his Norwegian counterpart, Anniken Huitfeldt, to discuss prospects for the normalization of political dialogue between the two countries and ways of expanding trade and economic cooperation. The ministers coordinated their approaches to the problems of Russia’s economic and research activities on the Spitsbergen Archipelago.