KIEV, January 18 (AVN) - Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev has met Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma in the framework of Sergeyev's official visit, the Military News Agency learned.
During the meeting Sergeyev and Kuchma discussed the possibility of creating the unification of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and Ukrainian navy for co-operational guarding of the Sevastopol coastal area. Kuchma is assured that those negotiations will provide a possibility of more detailed discussion of bilateral co-operation in the military-and-technical sphere and prospects of unified penetration to the international military equipment market.
During the talks both officials mentioned a positive shift in the realisation of some promising international projects including those in the aviation building sphere and underlined the necessity of activating co-operational aerospace developments.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexander Kuzmuk has informed both officials on the beginning of works on building Russian-Ukrainian co-operational navigational units. Together they also discussed the ways of normalisation of the Trans-Dniestr situation.
Sergeyev and Kuzmuk has also talked on the problem of relations between Russia, Ukraine and NATO and the co-operation of both countries' Defence Ministries with the Council of Europe in the military sphere.
Sergeyev and Kuzmuk will sign the plan of co-operation for 2001 on Thursday. The draft plan envisages the conduction of 54 co-operational missions of which 25 will take place in Russian and 29 in Ukraine. Defence ministers and chiefs-of-staff mutual visits are planned as well. Specialists from the Air Force, Air Defence (traditionally the most preferable spheres of bilateral co-operation), Navy, radiological, chemical and biological security, engineering and military medicine troops will also take part in the co-operational missions. The draft plan also envisages the completing of acceptance, handing and withdrawal of materiel of the Ukrainian Navy from the Black Sea Fleet stocks by the end of the third quarter of 2001.