NOVO-OGARYOVO (Moscow Region), June 2 (RIA Novosti) - President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia had no intention of annexing any territories.
"Russia has never raised the issue of annexing any territories outside its current borders," Putin told top officials of G8 news agencies. "We have no plans of the kind."
Putin said that uniform approaches needed to be worked out for the resolution of regional conflicts.
"I believe that we all should, and can, cooperate to draft common rules and uniform approaches to events happening in various regions of the world," Putin said commenting on his position to the development in Montenegro, which recently voted for independence from Serbia.
Touching upon the problem of Kosovo, which remains under a UN protectorate but is widely assumed to be on the way to independence, Putin said that if the Albanian-dominated province in Serbia were given sovereignty, it would be difficult to explain to people in Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia why they could not secede from Georgia.
"When we hear that one approach is possible in one place [but] is unacceptable in another, it is difficult to understand and is even more difficult to explain to people," Putin said.
