"To ensure shared interests in the global market, Russia and Ukraine must build up efforts in several essential industrial and economic fields-aerospace and iron-and-steel industries, rolled steel manufacture, shipbuilding and engineering. If we fail to do so within the next 18 months or two years, at the longest, Western and Eastern rivals will strangle a greater part of those industries in Ukraine, and analogous Russian-based manufacturers will face a much tougher competition than now."
Meanwhile, neither Russia nor Ukraine have coped with pressing challenges of industrial updating and restructuring-in particular, in aviation and space rocket R&D and manufacture, the MP emphatically added.
"What we need are flexible, latter-day patterns for Russian-Ukrainian industrial partnership. We are not to put off their establishment to the day either country is through with reforming its, let say, aviation industry. The work ought to go on along both channels simultaneously. That is quite possible, as we know from global experience." To illustrate his point, Mr. Kokoshin referred to Western Europe's EADS consortium, with French and German aerospace companies for a backbone.
"France and Germany intend to establish a shipbuilding analogue of the EADS. The new company will bring together all-with token exceptions-shipyards in European Union countries that build vessels for the navies. Wolfgang Clement and Nicolas Sarcozy, German and French Economy Ministers, respectively, came up with the announcement quite recently. Russian and Ukrainian shipbuilders ought to take it as an alert. Both countries' governments and private industrialists ought to sit up and take notice," remarked the parliamentarian.
"As for rolled steel manufacture, major developments are coming up here, too, as Lakshmi Mittal, Indian tycoon resident in London, intends to start a corporate supermammoth," he pointed out.
