EU:The EU and Russia agreed to phase out overflight charges for Europe's airlines at a summit yesterday but there was little progress on a range of other critical issues.
Tense discussions over Russia's one-year ban on Polish food exports and the EU-Russia energy relationship failed to produce any significant breakthroughs.
There was also no meeting of minds over the thorny issue of human rights in Russia, which cast a shadow over the summit in Helsinki following the death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko.
Russian president Vladimir Putin dismissed allegations that the Russian secret service had been involved in the assassination and warned that the case should not be used "for political provocation".
And when questioned by Finnish prime minister Matti Vanhanen about the murder of another key critic of his regime, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Mr Putin retorted that political murders were also a fact of life in the EU.
"We should not only talk about this; there are also assassinations in European countries . . . Law enforcement agencies and prosecutors all over Europe have been trying to track down Mafia criminals for decades," he said.
One source said the round- table discussions between the leaders were "typically frank", as always when Mr Putin was present, and contained little of the "usual diplomatic twisting and turning" that are so often seen at meetings in Brussels.
For example, despite public pledges that Russia and the EU are mutually dependent as supplier and customer for energy, it is believed that Mr Putin told EU leaders rather bluntly that they had few alternative sources of gas or oil except Russia and Iran.
Energy was expected to be a key theme of the summit, with the EU hopeful that Russia will agree to sign up to principles contained in a 1994 energy charter that would open its oil and gas pipeline infrastructure to EU investment.
Russia has so far refused to ratify those parts of the charter that deal with this issue and again yesterday Mr Putin gave no indication that Russia was ready to liberalise its oil and gas sector.
Energy has been a central theme of EU-Russia relations since in January Moscow cut gas supplies to several EU states in a dispute with Ukraine over prices. The EU wants energy to be a central component of a new, comprehensive EU-Russia political agreement, which was scheduled to be the main focus of yesterday's summit.
But Poland vetoed the start of talks on the new agreement on the eve of the Helsinki summit, leaving its EU partners and Russia with little positive news to announce.
Mr Putin said he deplored the failure of the EU to begin talks with Russia on the proposed new partnership and co-operation agreement. European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said he was also disappointed about the Polish veto.
However, he said Russia's ban on Polish meat exports - the key reason for the veto - was "disproportionate". He said he had "appealed to the president of Russia to lift it". Mr Putin gave no guarantees but insisted it was a technical rather than political issue.
"This is not about the quality of Polish meat," he said. Instead it was about the effectiveness of Warsaw in preventing Polish exporters from exporting meat from China or India that was fraudulently relabelled as Polish.
One issue that was resolved at the summit was a dispute over the royalty fees that Russia charges European airlines to overfly Siberia.
Under an agreement signed yesterday Russia has agreed to phase out these charges by 2013.