Moscow, 29 October: The West does not have a clear strategy towards Russia and a number of other former Soviet countries, and is building relations based on minor issues, the Yabloko party leader Grigoriy Yavlinskiy has said.

"The strategy chosen by Europe in 1947 after the World War II became useless after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Do you have any strategy that does not have anything to do with Polish meat and gas? What do you want Russia to be like in 25 years?" Yavlinskiy said on Monday (29 October) at the round table meeting arranged in Moscow by Green parties from several European countries.

Yavlinskiy also touched on the topic of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT). "The last year of the SORT (duration) is coming to an end. I would like to assure you that it will be the main issue of all international relations. We are wasting time when we are talking about meat and pipelines only. We should return to the SORT treaty, and it will probably be an important step towards creating a joint ABM system," Yavlinskiy said.

As for the situation with democracy in Russia, Yabloko's leader said that it was "a most difficult issue which by 99 per cent should be resolved by us". He called on the West to "realise that what is currently happening in Russia is an authoritarian system, not a democracy".

"There is a large gap between (Western) politicians and Western journalists that are working in Moscow. I often talk to them and the latter assess the situation objectively, but when politicians come here - it's a catastrophe, as if they were born yesterday. It seems that they don't even read their own newspapers," Yavlinskiy said.

He also criticized the EU position regarding the Russia-Ukraine gas conflict. In Yavlinskiy's view, in this case the EU should have taken the responsibility to help Ukraine to switch over to European gas prices, and to ensure that agreements between all the participants of the gas market are clear and transparent.

"But we have had an obscure story. Some Swiss company appeared, it had a turnover of 30,000 dollars, it was given 7bn (dollars) and became the main operator in charge of supplying gas to Europe. We were told: everything is fine, gas is being supplied," Yavlinskiy said.

"Cooperation between the EU and Russia is inevitable and will exist forever, but it should be built constructively and effectively," Yavlinskiy stressed.