Opening remarks by Dmitry Medvedev:

Your Holiness, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot help but share my emotions with you, and not only because this is the first meeting of our foundation's board of trustees here in the New Jerusalem Monastery, but also because (and in any event we have shared our impressions with his Holiness) we can see what has been accomplished compared to what was here only recently. This means that we are on the right track, that the work of the foundation's board of trustees and the tremendous number of people who are involved in the monastery’s restoration, who are contributing to it – to whatever large or small degree – is producing results. These results imbue us with confidence that the monastery will be restored to its original beauty and will probably look even better than before, though this is hard for us to judge.

Four years ago, together with the Russian Orthodox Church, we started the work on restoring the monastery, established the board of trustees and set ourselves the task of completing this work by 2016. Let me repeat again that we have been truly impressed by what we have seen. I’m not saying this simply to praise the restorers -- these are indeed special emotions. Practically two buildings are ready to be put into service (the gateway church and the Sunday school). The restoration of the main facilities (that we were shown today) – the church itself and the belfry – continues with the involvement of the best forces: 900 people and, as the Father has said, there will be 1,200 people performing this work before long.

Father Superior Feofilakt: By the end of the year.

Dmitry Medvedev: By the end of the year. Well, a large project required a large workforce to restore it.

Importantly, this large-scale work does not interfere with the life of the monastery. Moreover, the church museum – one of the oldest in the country – continues to operate, and is getting ready to move into a new building, which was actually one of the goals of our joint work.

Between 2009 and 2012, the Government has allocated four billion roubles for the restoration of the monastery. We’ll continue funding it – and I’d like to mention this now – although our budget is being formed under fairly difficult circumstances and not all the facilities that we planned to build will receive funding. Major companies that have representatives here are helping us, and I’d like to thank all the sponsors and all the participants in the restoration process. Ordinary citizens are also contributing to it. In 2011-2012 about 300 million roubles were donated – all in all, 821 million have been raised since 2008, and donations keep coming in.

As for the former or current difficulties, we’ll talk about them a bit later. At any rate, the work is being done at the right pace, and we can hope that the monastery will be restored as planned.

The fund’s site carries detailed reports about the work that has been done. It is very important that it has published the names of people and lists of organisations that are taking part in the restoration of the monastery. It is very important that not a single name is omitted, because it is our Russian tradition to remember all those who have made their contribution. This is our common cause.

I hope that the fund will retain the principles of its work and be as open and transparent as ever. That is all that I wanted to say.

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