ASTANA, January 12 (RIA Novosti) - The leaders of Russia and Kazakhstan have started an official meeting in Astana.
Before the meeting, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev thanked his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for attending his inauguration as president on Wednesday.
Nazarbayev said, "Your attendance raised Kazakhstan's prestige in the world."
The Kazakh president said that he would pay the first official visit of his new term to Russia and added that Putin's current visit to Kazakhstan would take bilateral relations to a higher level.
Nazarbayev, who has been in power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was reelected to serve another seven years as president of Kazakhstan in December.
