Presidents Vladimir Putin, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Saparmurat Niyazov and Islam Karimov discussed a partnership in energy policy and protecting the interests of natural gas producing countries.
As Mr Putin said, this partnership would aim to satisfy the energy demand of all the Commonwealth countries, and their partners in the European and other world markets, including Asia. The summit participants discussed pooling their efforts in order to achieve the goal. The discussion was very topical since Russia and Turkmenistan are principal gas extractors, while Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were willing to offer their pipelines.
The heads of state made a joint statement summarising their meeting.