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Good afternoon. Welcome to the NATO-Russia Council in Foreign Ministerial session.

Eighteen months ago in Rome, 20 Presidents and Prime Ministers met to change the world. Great powers came together to heal Europe, and to build a unique new partnership spanning old divisions and burying old stereotypes.

Their aim was to allow NATO's member countries and the Russian Federation to work side-by-side to defeat the common threats which face the international community in the 21st century.

Today, that vision sounds commonplace. Just as meetings of the NATO Russia Council have become business as usual.

But this Council remains an extraordinary achievement, an example of genuine statesmanship in 20 capital cities. More than that, the NATO-Russia Council has quickly established itself as one of the most important multinational fora for practical cooperation across a wide and growing spectrum of security and defence issues.

A talking shop, yes. But also an action shop. The record for 2003 speaks for itself.

We have deepened our political dialogue, especially on the Balkans and Afghanistan. We have taken important political initiatives together on border security in Southeast Europe and support for reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We have intensified our co-operation against terrorism. Practical projects are underway in the fields of civil emergency planning, WMD proliferation, airspace management co-operation, and intelligence threat assessment. Russia has offered practical support to NATO in Afghanistan.

We have built on years of crisis management cooperation in the Balkans to develop modalities for possible NATO-Russia peacekeeping operations.

In parallel, we are making real progress in enhancing interoperability among our military forces, theatre missile defence systems, and civil emergency planning and response teams; and we have launched an ambitious military training and exercise programme.

Before Rome, political and practical cooperation of this kind, producing real outputs on the ground, would have been inconceivable. Today, you will be asked to approve the NRC work programme for 2004 which sets our sights even higher. How remarkable that this ambition now appears quite natural.

For me, the success of the NATO-Russia Council has been perhaps the most satisfying achievement of the past four years. We talk a lot about transformation. This Council is evidence that we can deliver transformation, not simply in institutions or capabilities but in attitudes. A transformation that is one of the most profound changes for the better in living memory.

At our last meeting in Madrid, we celebrated the first anniversary of the NRC. I hope that under the leadership of my friend and successor, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer the second anniversary will be commemorated, in Istanbul next June, at the highest level.

I would now like to ask the ladies and gentlemen of the press to leave us, so that we can proceed with our deliberations in closed session.