SHANNON (Ireland), May 7: US Vice-President Dick Cheney took Russia to task again on Sunday as he ended a tour of ex-communist states making the transition to democracy.

Heading home from visits to Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Croatia, Mr Cheney told reporters aboard Air Force Two he had heard repeated concerns about Russia’s “internal developments” as well as its use of energy resources to “obtain leverage” over its neighbours.

He insisted, however, that Russia had nothing to fear from Nato, which has expanded eastwards since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and should welcome the establishment of stable democracies on its borders.

Mr Cheney maintained that Moscow needed to understand “the best neighbours that Russia can have are good, strong democracies”.

Amid concern about the repercussions of the US criticism, Mr Cheney dismissed the notion that Russia would retaliate by hardening its position at the United Nations against a US-led push for new measures against Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

Russia responded angrily on Thursday after Mr Cheney told Baltic and Black Sea leaders in Vilnius that Russian President Vladimir Putin was backsliding on democracy and using energy reserves to “blackmail” Moscow’s neighbours.

“I thought they were rather measured tones,” Mr Cheney said, defending the harsh language he used at the Vilnius conference.

He said almost every country at the summit had voiced concerns that the Russians were “trying to use their control over the production and transportation of natural gas in particular to obtain leverage over a lot of governments in the area.”

Russia briefly turned off its natural gas taps to Ukraine earlier this year in a pricing dispute that interrupted supplies to Europe.

Russia brushed off Mr Cheney’s remarks on Thursday as “incomprehensible”, but lingering tensions could bode ill for a Group of Eight industrialised nations’ summit in St Petersburg in July.

US-Russia relations have been increasingly chilly in recent months.

Moscow suspects the US policy of promoting global democracy is really an instrument to establish Washington as the dominant power in the post-Soviet states.

In the past two years, peaceful revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia have brought pro-Western governments to power.

“There is a general view ... that somehow the Russians are convinced that there is some kind of conspiracy that is aimed at them,” a senior Bush administration official told reporters on Mr Cheney’s plane, which touched down briefly at Shannon airport in Ireland on its way back to Washington.

“That is not true.”

On the last stop of his five-day tour Mr Cheney voiced support for Croatia, Albania and Macedonia in their quest for membership of Nato and the European Union, saying they would revitalise the two Western clubs.

The three countries missed out on Nato’s two big eastward expansion waves that followed the fall of Communism.

Further integration of Moscow’s neighbours into the Western military alliance could compound Russian anger.—Reuters