(BRUSSELS) - European nations on Wednesday agreed to launch talks on a new partnership accord with a revived and powerful Russia, ending an almost two-year impasse within the EU.

The agreement was reached at a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels after Lithuania, the last member state blocking the talks, was persuaded that its grievances over Russian energy supplies and Moscow's stance on Georgia would be addressed.

The EU's Slovenian presidency said it had secured agreement "on a negotiating mandate for a new comprehensive EU-Russia agreement," which will be formally approved by European Union foreign ministers when they meet in Brussels on Monday.

The EU has been trying to update the existing accord -- a framework for Brussels-Moscow relations which is more than a decade old -- to take into account modern geopolitical and economic realities.

Fresh EU-Russia negotiations are also deemed key to improving relations, which soured under former president now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, as well as assuring a reliable energy supply from Russia and reviewing human rights.

Any EU member can veto the start of such talks and they had been blocked first by Poland and latterly by Lithuania.

The former Soviet Republic, which entered the EU in 2004, finally dropped its objections after talks Monday and Tuesday between Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas and his French and German counterparts Bernard Kouchner and Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, in Ljubljana, praised the EU decision to open talks with Russia as "an important milestone".

"Problematic issues will continue to be the object of negotiations and will be solved along the way," he told reporters.

Lithuania's spokeswoman in Brussels said her country had been granted "everything we asked for".

One of the concessions was the addition, via annexes to the mandate guidelines for the European Commission, of statements on key points for Vilnius, including a call for the resumption of Russian oil deliveries to the country's only refinery, which were stopped in 2006.

Another, which was the source of much of the problems, stresses that the EU will closely follow the situation in Georgia, where Russia has boosted its support of rebel governments in the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Tbilisi accuses Moscow of seeking to annex the two territories and of trying to weaken Georgia in order to stymie its efforts to join the NATO military alliance.

The EU and Russia hold summits and working group discussions twice a year but the bilateral accord is based on a deal reached in 1997 when Russia was still in convalescence following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Since then Moscow has regained its stature while the EU has expanded into it former eastern European stronghold However as Russia has rebounded, thanks in part to its massive oil and natural gas reserves, tensions with Europe have multiplied.

The European leaders have become increasingly concerned at their dependence on Russian fossil fuels and Moscow's ability to turn of the taps as a political manoeuvre.

Human rights have also long been a bone of contention under Putin.

"The existing accord states that we share the same democratic values. It remains to be seen whether this will still be the case in the new deal," said Eneko Landaburu, who will lead the EU negotiators in the talks.

The EU-Russia talks will be formally launched at an EU-Russia summit in Siberia on June 26-27, when new President Dmitry Medvedev will represent Russia for the first time.

"At the moment when we meet with Medvedev for the first time, we want to be able to launch into the talks which are set to be long and difficult" said Eneko Landaburu, who will lead the talks with Russia for the European side.

The European agreement to open the talks with Moscow "was nothing," said one European diplomat. "The difficult part starts now".

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