The 20th regular meeting of the Coordinating Committee on the implementation of the Agreement on cooperation between the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and JINR was held at JINR on 26–27 February.

The German delegation was headed by reappointed chairman S.Kern from the department of fundamental research of the Ministry of science and education of Germany; the JINR delegation was headed by JINR Vice-Director M.G.Itkis. The JINR Directorate informed the Committee about the second Seven-year plan for the strategic development of JINR, about the JINR basic facilities development projects and major scientific results of JINR in 2009. The German delegation informed JINR about modern trends of development of scientific research in fundamental natural sciences in Germany and, in particular, about perspectives of FAIR and XFEl projects. The amount of the German contribution stayed approximately on the level of the previous year, and all the projects were approved at that.