Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ratified a new foreign policy paper on the general direction of the country's diplomatic efforts, as well as its relations with the United States, Europe and NATO.

The top priority of Russia's foreign policy is ensuring national security and nurturing a good international environment for its development.

The nation also aims to contribute to the process toward creating a just and democratic world through pushing for good neighborly relations, collective solving of international problems and eliminating hotbeds of conflict, according to an article posted Tuesday on the president's website.

Russia embraces an open, foreseeable and pragmatic foreign policy, the article said.

The new framework, which extends and develops on a foreign policy paper approved by former president Vladimir Putin in June 2000, denounces unilateral actions unauthorized by the United Nations, which, Russia believes, will destabilize the world by causing tensions, provoking arms races, deepening conflicts, and creating national and religious rifts.

On relations with the United States, it says Russia will build a strategic partnership with the country and overstep barriers of strategic principles of the past.

"It is necessary to switch over Russian-U.S. relations to the state of strategic partnership, to overstep barriers of strategic principles of the past and to concentrate on real threats, and where differences persist, to work on their settlement in the spirit of mutual respect," the new policy paper says.

Moscow will strive to achieve new understanding with Washington on disarmament and weapons control.

The paper also pledges to take confidence-building measures, ensure transparency in space explorations and anti-missile defense, and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, secure development of peaceful nuclear power, enhance cooperation in countering terrorism and other challenges.

Russia hopes to build an open and democratic collective security and cooperation system across Europe.

A unified Europe should be based on equal cooperation among Russia, the European Union and the United States, it says.

The paper expresses opposition to NATO's eastward expansion, including Ukraine and Georgia's proposed membership of the group, and its military establishment on the Russian border, saying the moves have violated the principle of mutual security and threatened to divide Europe.

Russia will base its relations with the NATO on the group's intentions regarding developing links with Moscow, the paper states.

Regarding the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), formed in 1991 by 12 former Soviet Republics, the paper says Russia will devote itself to a peaceful solution of conflicts in the region and aspires to build friendly relations among CIS members on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and respect for each other's interests.

(Xinhua News Agency July 16, 2008)