Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of the Republic of Uganda Yoweri Kaguta Museveni met on the sidelines of the Russia–Africa Summit in Sochi.
The two leaders had initially interacted at the opening ceremony of the summit and later at the bilateral meeting.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr President, friends,
Welcome to Sochi.
I remember your visit on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between our countries.
We share a common task: to develop trade and economic ties and increase mutual trade. In this respect, I would like to note the decision to create a working group on cooperation in the mineral and raw materials sphere as part of the intergovernmental commission, adopted in October 2017 during a Russian business mission to Kampala. With its active participation, an agreement was reached in April 2018 to establish Uganda’s national system for identifying, evaluating and certifying mineral fields and to further create a comprehensive analytical lab with international accreditation in cooperation with Russia. I believe that a good task has been set, which will create conditions to step up our work.
We are also satisfied to note that several joint economic projects have already got underway in Uganda. A cotton processing plant operates with a share of Russian capital. Russia’s Unity trading house founded UgaRuss in Kampala to supply consumer goods made in Russia.
We can also see opportunities for cooperation in construction, information technologies and cybersecurity, agriculture, medicine, pharmaceutics, telecommunications, helicopter use and maintenance, and the environment.
Mr President, I am very glad to have another meeting with you. Thank you for coming to Sochi to take part in the first Russia–Africa Summit.
President of Uganda Yoweri Kaguta Museveni: Your Excellency,
First of all, I thank you for calling this Africa–Russia conference. It has been long overdue. Russia had such conferences with India, with China, even with Turkey, Japan. And yet, when we were fighting for freedom, it was Russia who supported us, so it is good to have this meeting now, the Africa–Russia meeting.
It is good that your intermission has started the meeting, and it is going well, so what I want to say at this meeting is a few areas, which we could look at. Number one is defence and security. We have been cooperating very well, we have supported our building an army by buying good Russian equipment, aircrafts, tanks, and so on. We want to buy more. We have been paying cash in the past, cash, cash, cash. And this slows down the pace, because we must have cash to pay. What I propose is that you supply and we pay. That would be some sort of supply that would make us build faster, because now we pay cash, like for this Sukhoi jet, we paid cash.
Now this would affect the batches, but also we want to build a workshop for maintenance, overhaul and upgrade, because we have quite a bit of Russian equipment there, and now to overhaul, we need to bring it all the way back to here and then back. Transport costs. So we want to localise the maintenance and overhaul.