VILNIUS - East European leaders voiced anxiety on Thursday over Russia's use of its massive energy resources to enforce its foreign policy goals and called for efforts to diversify their sources of supply.
"Unjust manipulation or interruption of energy supplies is as much a security threat as is military action," Czech Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra said at a conference in Vilnius involving the presidents of six countries.
"Post-Soviet countries have been experiencing that on a daily basis, as Russia's appetite for using energy as a political weapon is growing," he added.
Russia's position as the main energy supplier to its neighbours and its growing importance to the European Union as a whole has been a key theme of the two days of meetings at the energy security conference in the Lithuanian capital.
Discussions on Thursday included Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, Poland's Lech Kaczynski and Lithuania's Valdas Adamkus as well as the presidents of Latvia, Romania and Azerbaijan. With envoys from Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, they concluded with a statement that widening sources of supply was key.
Participants backed closer cooperation between Europe, the United States, the Caspian and the Black Sea regions to bring energy from Central Asia and the South Caucasus to Europe.
They agreed this was "crucial for reliable and diverse energy flows into the European Union".
Russia says it is a reliable supplier of energy. But fears have been awakened by actions such as its repeated willingness to cut gas flows to Ukraine, through which Europe gets most of its imports of the fuel from Russia.
Russia is the source of a quarter of Europe's gas.
