President Meloni’s remarks with the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev

Thank you very much, Mr President, thank you again for this invitation, thank you for the warm welcome, and, moreover, thank you for our very, very productive and wide talks.

I want to tell you that I think you are one of the most pragmatic leaders I have met in my life, and that it’s very useful to talk with somebody that really understands how complex things are in these difficult times. But, in these difficult times, there are some good news and one of those good news is the extraordinary relationship between Italy and Kazakhstan, that we would like even to improve with this visit. Our relationship is excellent, we’ve been saying that many times, but there is also room to do always better, and this is the will of this visit. First of all, recognising the importance of this country, of this region, which is a crossroads of history, of continents, of West and East. And, in a period in which it seems that people are no longer able to talk, I think who is able to dialogue and to understand others and to help others in meeting, that can be very useful and is useful for all of us. So, we are ready also to give our help but we want to recognise the importance of the country, of the region, and we want to recognise the strategic importance of our cooperation. We know our cooperation is quite wide. I think we could even improve the topics on which we work together. We’ve been talking about many things, and we won’t repeat for reasons of time, but we’ve been talking for example about the topic of critical raw materials. So, not only oil and gas, energy, infrastructures, all the things we work on, defence – we’ve got an excellent cooperation, we can improve – until culture, for there is also very, very good cooperation on culture between our peoples. Ancient cultures that meet, exchange; that makes the difference also for the friendship of our peoples.

And then, at the end, also the regional cooperation. Thank you for the first summit at the leaders’ level that we will have in the afternoon. Thank you for organising it.

I would like this day to be a historical one, Mr President, this is the message I want to pass.

So, thank you for what we’ve done, but thank you moreover for what we will do.