The Council of Ministers, on 27 July, effectively gave the go-ahead for talks to begin on "the possibility" of including Russia in the seventh research framework programme, FP7. The guiding principles agreed by the ministers for negotiating Russia's inclusion in FP7 will depend how the new EU-Russia partnership agreement holds up. EU-Russian relations are based on an agreement signed in 1994 (which came into force in 1997), but negotiations on a new, more "strategic" agreement began in 2008.
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