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German chancellor in Moscow to celebrate Orthodox Christmas

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January 7, 2001 

MOSCOW-- (AP) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his wife arrived in Moscow Saturday on a private visit to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas with President Vladimir Putin and his wife.

Schroeder and his wife, Doris, were met at Moscow's Vnukovo airport by Putin's wife Lyudmila. The two leaders and their wives were expected to have a late lunch at the Kremlin, followed by an evening performance of the Bolshoi ballet.

The two first ladies chatted in German at the airport, and Schroeder said he was surprised to be met personally by the Russian president's wife.

Although the two-day visit is being billed as private, Putin and Schroeder will discuss bilateral issues, including the Russia's plan to skip paying the first-quarter payment to Paris Club nations, German officials said.

Ernst Jorg von Studnitz, Germany's ambassador to Russia, said in an interview Friday with the ITAR-Tass news agency that Putin and Schroeder would discuss a wide range of matters, including the problem of Soviet and Russian debts to Germany.

Soviet-era debt to the Paris Club, a group of industrialized nations, totals about dlrs 48 billion, of which close to half is owed to Germany. Russia owes about dlrs 3.5 billion in interest payments on the debt this year. The missed first quarter payment amounts to about dlrs 1.5 billion.

Russian officials said this week a decision on Soviet era debts would be made after an International Monetary Fund visit to Moscow in late January.

Russia's ambassador to Germany, Sergei Krylov, said in a radio interview Saturday that the relationship between the two countries had improved over the past decade.

He told German radio that the two leaders had chosen the meeting "without protocol restraints ... with all the possibilities that that offers." Krylov said he assumed concrete political issues would be discussed.

Since their first meeting, when Putin visited Berlin last June, the two leaders have developed friendly ties, iinformally addressing each other in German. Putin, a former KGB agent who served in East Germany during the Soviet era, speaks fluent German.

After the Bolshoi ballet performance of Giselle, Schroeder and Putin and their wives will celebrate Orthodox Christmas at a midnight mass beneath the golden domes of the recently rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Interfax news agency reported.

Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on Jan. 7 in Russia in accordance with the Julian calendar which the Russian church continues to follow.