Lithuania has agreed to drop its objections to European Union talks with Russia on a new strategic partnership, the Baltic country's foreign minister said Sunday, according to AP. Lithuania had blocked the negotiations because it first wanted Moscow to improve its ties with immediate neighbors. But Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas said Sunday that the EU has agreed to include Lithuania's concerns in the mandate for the negotiations planned for next month. His comments came after a meeting with Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency. «After today's negotiations we may say that the EU may rely on Lithuania and your country may rely on the EU,» Rupel told reporters in Vilnius. The EU wants a new strategic partnership to redefine the way it imports much of its oil and gas from Russia and to persuade it to open its vast energy sector to investors from western Europe. The new agreement would replace a decade-old deal with Moscow. The talks have stalled over a trade dispute between Poland and Russia _ now resolved _ and Lithuania's concerns over energy supplies. Lithuania wants Russia to fix an oil pipeline to a Lithuanian refinery and peacefully resolve «frozen conflicts» in Georgia and other ex-Soviet republics. It also wants Russia to cooperate in criminal investigations involving former Soviet troops in Lithuania and to give compensation to Lithuanians who were deported to Siberian labor camps and prisons during the Soviet occupation. Vaitiekunas and Rupel are set to travel to Georgia on Monday, together with the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, in an effort to calm down tensions with Russia. Russia has been sparring with its former satellite over influence with two breakaway regions of Georgia. Recently Moscow has moved to increase ties with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and has added to its peacekeeping troops in Abkhazia.
