President Medvedev goes to Lisbon for RF-NATO Council meeting Sat.

MOSCOW, November 20 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
on Saturday is going to Lisbon, where a session of the NATO Council at the
head of state and government level is underway. The Russian head of state
will attend a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council (RNC) devoted to
follow-up steps in co-operation between Russia and NATO Council. He will
present his proposals for building further cooperation between Russia and
NATO.
The Russian president will arrive in Portugal in the afternoon.
Alongside participation in the RNC session he is scheduled to have two
bilateral meetings - with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
After the RNC meeting, expected to last more than two hours, in
accordance with the rules of the protocol the host of the summit, NATO
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, will hold a news conference. Then
the Russian president at his meeting with the media will present the main
theses of his report and answer questions.
The Kremlin expects that the forthcoming meeting of the RNC "will open
up a new stage in relations between Russia and NATO and clearly identify
the willingness to move towards a strategic and mutually beneficial
partnership in responding to modern security challenges."
"It is assumed that the discussion at the meeting will confirm the
relevance of the RNC as an important channel of communication on key
security issues, including difficult ones, on which differences remain,"
presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko said.
The Russia-NATO Council was created in accordance with the declaration
NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality, signed at the summit of Russia and
the Alliance in Rome on May 28, 2002. It is a mechanism for consultations,
coordination of common approaches, cooperation, joint decisions and joint
actions by Russia and NATO member states on a wide range of security
issues in the Euro-Atlantic region. The first summit of the RNC at the
level of heads of state and government was held on April 4, 2008 in
Bucharest and was attended by the president of the Russian Federation.
In the wake of the conflict in the North Caucasus in August 2008, the
political dialogue within the RNC meeting was frozen. Bearing in mind the
continued practical cooperation and interest in the further development of
relations the Alliance gradually developed the prevailing view in favor of
the feasibility of restoring the political dialogue within the RNC on an
informal basis to discuss mutual security concerns.
Moscow hopes that the summit will allow for putting on record the end
of the post-"cold war" period. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
said earlier, during that period, "lasting relapses of the past continued
to make themselves felt, there were elements of distrust, there were
elements of departure from the assurances that were given in the 1990s,
primarily those on the indivisibility of security."
"Therefore we expect that we shall be able to make a statement about
the end of such a period uncertainty, so to say," Lavrov stated. "We shall
not just draw a bottom line ending this period, but also formulate the
tasks of promoting strategic partnership."
"But, of course, strategic partnership should be based on an equitable
basis, on the agreements reached between Russia and NATO previously," said
the Russian foreign minister. "First of all this concerns the obligation
not to strengthen the security of any country at the expense of harm to
the security of another party to such cooperation and, secondly, there
will be work within the Russia-NATO Council not in a 28-against-one
format; each country will be acting in its own national capacity," he said.

-0-str