This will be the third meeting in such a format. The practice of holding such meetings was started during Berlusconi's visit to Russia in April of 2002 and continued in the course of Putin's visit to Italy in November 2003.
"One of the items on the agenda is to impart a new quality to bilateral economic ties with the emphasis on investment cooperation and industrial co-production," a source in the Kremlin told RIA Novosti.
The assumption is that upon the completion of the talks, in the presence of the two leaders, a raft of documents will be signed in the sphere of economy and information technology, and cooperation between law enforcement bodies, in particular the interior ministries.
A spokesman for the chancellery of the Italian prime minister told a RIA Novosti correspondent that the very fact of holding a third enlarged Italian-Russian summit points to the strategic character of the Moscow-Rome partnership.
The agency's source pointed out that Italy is one of Russia's leading trading partners in the West. According to him, the tourist sector of the economy is developing especially quickly, while the number of Italian tourists travelling to Russia has risen by 29 per cent.
The source called special attention to the prospects for cooperation in the fields of energy and joint use of outer space.
"The practice of creating 'industrial districts' in Russia with the participation of medium-sized and small Italian businesses has proved its worth. Suffice it to recall the example of the Lipetsk district, where heads of the two countries opened a new plant of Italian firm Merloni in the course of Berlusconi's visit to Russia in April of this year. The reference is to systemic economic cooperation between the two states," said the spokesman.
At the same time, in Moscow's view, Russian-Italian economic cooperation has aspects that need looking into particularly closely.
Receiving Italy's Vice-Premier Gianfranco Fini in October, Vladimir Putin pointed to a drop in trade turnover between the two countries over the previous seven months. "For us it is an unusual phenomenon, because trade with all our traditional partners is growing, and significantly," Putin said, urging the governments of Russia and Italy to analyse the situation and take energetic measures to remedy it.
According to the Russian side, trade between Italy and Russia in the first nine months of the year reached $6.7 billion. In 2003 it was worth $10.9 billion.
