European Union leaders on Tuesday backed President Dmitry Medvedev's efforts to reform Russia by launching a modernization partnership program, but they remained conspicuously silent about a violent crackdown on opposition protesters.
Speaking to reporters after a two-day EU-Russia summit in Rostov-on-Don, EU President Herman Van Rompuy stressed that the 27-member bloc wanted to be a close partner in Medvedev's drive for a more competitive and diversified economy and hinted that the Europeans were better suited for that than the Americans.
“With Russia, we don’t need a reset. We want a fast-forward,” he said, referring to the much-discussed "reset" of relations between Moscow and Washington.
Van Rompuy and Medvedev signed a joint declaration on the modernization partnership, which is supposed to give Russia easier access to Western know-how and technology while committing the country to more democratic reforms and fighting corruption.
Van Rompuy cautioned that the program needed political will from Moscow to succeed.
"For the partnership to become successful, the Russian modernization needs to become a reality and it needs to follow certain patterns to avoid protectionism," he said, according to a transcript published by the Kremlin.
The EU has complained that Moscow has used the economic crisis as a pretext for protectionist measures. Brussels says it has lost 600 million euros ($730 million) as a result of increased customs duties.
The summit put an emphasis on economic and trade issues. The EU as a whole is Russia's largest trading partner, accounting for about 80 percent of the country's exchange of goods, but the trade relationship has in recent years been tarnished by disputes and uncertainty about Moscow's desire to become a member of the World Trade Organization.
Medvedev said a fledgling customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus would not influence its plans to join the WTO soon. If the union "works out … then we’ll enter separately,” he said, Interfax reported.
Medvedev suggested that it was mainly U.S. opposition that hampered the country's WTO accession.
"Everyone, including our American partners, should agree that Russia's membership in the WTO is not a carrot they are offering us all the time as a prize for our good behavior," he said in televised comments.
The EU leaders said in a statement that they continued to support Russia's early accession to WTO.
Van Rompuy did not address clashes between opposition activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where police detained about 200 protesters late Monday.
European human rights activists deplored the crackdown and lamented the fact that it happened as the EU-Russia summit started. "As long as the law is only enforced in the Kremlin's interest, there will be no modern Russia,” Volker Beck and Marieluise Beck, two Green Party deputies in the German Bundestag, said in a statement on the party's web site.
Speaking to reporters after the summit, Van Rompuy criticized recent killings of human rights activists and journalists and said Europeans were concerned about the “climate of impunity” created by the authorities in Chechnya and other parts of the North Caucasus.
Questions submitted at the post-summit news conference touched on the protests but were not among the four questions that were taken, an EU spokesman said.
The summit also failed to yield progress on visa-free travel, an issue pushed by Moscow after it was raised by the Spanish EU presidency in January. Expectations were low going into the summit after EU officials dashed Kremlin hopes that a roadmap toward visa-free travel could be forged at the summit.
But in a surprise move, Kremlin officials at the summit submitted their own framework convention for future visa-free travel between Russia and the EU-dominated Schengen zone.
An EU source familiar with the matter said the document resembles a convention signed earlier between Russia and another country with the country's name changed to "Schengen zone."
The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media about the document, which has not been cleared for publication.
The EU statement said merely that both sides had reiterated their commitment to the long-term objective of visa free travel.
"Work will now begin on preparing a list of common steps for a visa-free travel regime," the statement said.
In a sign of solidarity, both sides condemned Israel's deadly attack on an aid flotilla sailing to Gaza. "The EU and Russia demand a full and impartial inquiry of the events and circumstances," said a joint declaration by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Moscow has traditionally backed the Palestinians but has also cultivated closer ties with Israel in recent years.
The leaders also discussed how to tackle the global financial crisis by tightening global economic governance in the run-up of the next summit of the world's 20 leading economies in Canada later this month. Analysts have identified this as an area of common interest between Russia and much of Europe.
Other topics at the summit included energy policy and climate change.
Medvedev said the talks were held in an "open and business-like" atmosphere, which helped solve a whole range of questions.
It was the first EU-Russia summit after the EU reformed its leadership under the Lisbon Treaty, which created Van Rompuy's job as president of the EU Council and increased the foreign policy chief's powers.
Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso was the most senior EU official at the summit who had attended previous summits.
Also attending were EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht and Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina.