California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived in Moscow on Sunday, ahead of talks with President Dmitry Medvedev.
He received a welcome tweet from Medvedev, and then stopped at the U.S. Embassy to visit Marines from his home state, the governor said on his own Twitter account. He’s on a five-day trip to promote contacts between Silicon Valley business leaders and their local counterparts.
U.S. venture capitalists will also be in the delegation, whose visit is a follow-up to Schwarzenegger’s June meeting in California with President Dmitry Medvedev, where they talked about Russia’s efforts to boost technology, and specifically the Skolkovo project.
“There is no one that is better equipped to help them and to sell their goods and their knowledge and to invest than California,” Schwarzenegger told reporters Friday. “And so we are going to be in there, the first ones in, and we’re going to be very aggressive to help them with that.”
The governor said Russia’s decision to emulate Silicon Valley also gives California companies an opportunity to ex- pand into the Eastern European market, particularly in the field of green technology.
Officials from Internet search engine Google, software makers Oracle and Microsoft, biotechnology company
Amgen and fuel-cell technology startup Bloom Energy are among those accompanying Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger faced criticism for his weeklong trade mission last month to China, Japan and South Korea, which came in the midst of a deadlock over solutions to address California’s $19 billion shortfall.
Schwarzenegger signed a new budget into law Friday, after it passed both houses of the state legislature. It came 100 days into the start of the fiscal year.
After Russia, the delegation will stop in London, where the governor will meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron. The governor has traveled extensively since taking office in 2003.
(AP, MT)
