Russia is ready to cooperate with new US President Barack Obama on Afghanistan, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday as he visited Moscow's Central Asian ally Uzbekistan...
"We are ready to cooperate on this issue practically with all the countries, including the United States," he said in Tashkent, following talks with his Uzbek counterpart Islam Karimov...
"Let's hope the new US administration will be more successful than the previous one as far as Afghanistan-related issues are concerned," he added...
Karimov, for his part, welcomed a decision by the new US administration to focus its efforts on Afghanistan but said real improvements were needed in the near future...
"We will see the results only when they will become tangible," he said, adding that countries like India, China, Iran and Pakistan could join international efforts on Afghanistan...
"One needs to understand that the longer foreign forces are on the country's territory, the more occupational character they acquire," Karimov added...
Medvedev's two-day visit to Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan, follows a trip to the region by US army general David Petraeus. Russia and the US are competing for influence in the resource-rich region...
"Russia is the country which has always been present in this region, the country which has determined the policy here and the alignment of forces," Karimov told Medvedev at the start of the talks...
Medvedev's first trip as president was to Kazakhstan in May, and he since also visited Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan...
"The interests of a lot of great nations are meeting here, (and) contradictions and conflicts are meeting here," Karimov said...
At the start of the decade, relations between Uzbekistan and the West had shown signs of improvement, a development that caused alarm in Moscow...
But that changed after an armed uprising in the eastern town of Andijan in 2005 where the government's actions were bitterly criticised by Europe and the United States.
Uzbekistan retaliated by evicting a US air base that had been set up near the Afghan border following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington...
Tashkent has recently been sending signals that it is open to new alliances prompting new fears in Russia that Uzbekistan seeks to align itself with the West...
Medvedev and Karimov hailed the state of bilateral ties during the visit, which focused on developing economic and in particular energy relations as well as security cooperation...
"Even if no practical agreements were reached it does not mean the visit was empty," said Zurab Todua, a senior analyst with the Institute of Religion and Politics...
"The visit is important from the political point of view" and was designed to show that for Tashkent the "Russian vector was one of the most important ones."
The chief of Russian gas giant Gazprom Alexei Miller said in Tashkent the two countries might build new natural gas pipelines that would run parallel to the existing ones...
"We have agreed on a feasibility study on new gas pipeline capacities that will run parallel to the existing" facilities, Miller told reporters. Gazprom will buy more than 15 billion cubic meters of gas from Uzbekistan this year, he added...
As well as being is a significant regional gas exporter, Uzbekistan is a key transit country for the pumping of gas from Turkmenistan to Russia...
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