Vladimir Putin's opening speech:

Good afternoon, colleagues,

We continue our work on coordinating the main budget parameters for 2011 to 2013. Today we will discuss proposals on financing law enforcement, national defence and security.

Here we should complete the projects that we previously started and establish our future priorities.

First of all, I am talking about creating a new image for the Armed Forces, primarily, providing new equipment for the Army and Navy.

Thus, we are seriously increasing the size of defence orders. This year it will reach a record-breaking sum of 1.17 trillion roubles, 375 billion roubles of which will be used to pay for large deliveries of new equipment.

I would like to emphasise that we intend to buy only new, state-of-the-art equipment and not what was designed twenty or even thirty years ago. For this purpose, we made a full inventory of the military industrial complex and specified basic requirements for military production.

Of course, we should draft our rearmament plans with regard to the current economic situation and our budget. So, the Ministry of Defence and other state clients of the rearmament programme were asked to prepare detailed calculations and justification for the amount of necessary budget spending for 2011 and the following years. We will discuss them today.

The second project under way is reforming the military compensation system. In 2007, we raised this issue, specified the main requirements and began large-scale reforms of the salaries paid to military officers. Now, we should decide on the final requirements for this reform, set the deadline and establish the amount of increased compensation that will be paid to military officers.

At a meeting held on June 2, the Finance Ministry was charged with forming the corresponding intergovernmental commission. I would like Mr Kudrin to report on the results of this today.

Let's get down to work.