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BRUSSELS — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began his first talks in Brussels on Friday since his re-election earlier this year. Energy, trade, and Syria were on the agenda, and the discussions were expected to be tense.
BRUSSELS — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday added to recent signals that Moscow is slowly distancing itself from the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, its longstanding but now severely weakened ally.
Russia is the main external energy supplier to the 27-nation European Union, and Mr. Putin is to meet senior officials from the bloc in the 30th summit to take place between the two sides.
Warning of chaos, Mr. Putin, who was in Brussels for a European Union-Russia summit meeting, restated his country’s position that Syria’s civil war could be resolved only through talks between the parties involved. But he also insisted that “we aren’t a defender of the current Syrian leadership” and said that Moscow wants “a democratic regime in Syria based on the expression of the people’s will.”
In recent years, relations have been soured by disputes over gas pipelines, trade issues and human rights, and there are sharp differences with the union over Moscow’s support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria since the uprising began there in March 2011.
European nations are themselves divided over what to do but have increasingly tilted toward providing at least diplomatic support for the opponents of Mr. Assad.
European leaders have criticized Russia over the jailing of members of the female punk band Pussy Riot and new pressure on opposition figures since Mr. Putin was re-elected.
Russia has been the Syrian government’s main backer since an uprising against President Assad began in early 2011 and, along with China, has used its veto in the United Nations Security Council to block resolutions that would have imposed penalties on Syria.
For his part, Mr. Putin gave a number of combative performances when he appeared at summits in his previous terms as Russian president, often taking a tough line in private with fellow leaders and sometimes in public with the media.
Russia and the European Union remained at odds over energy issues, with Mr. Putin pressing the European Union to exempt the natural gas behemoth Gazprom from rules aimed at promoting greater competition in the energy market. But he won no favors for the company, Russia’s biggest.
In an angry outburst at a news conference after a summit in Brussels 10 years ago, Mr. Putin told a French reporter that those who criticized Russia’s campaign in Chechnya should join the Islamist holy war, suggesting that they first travel to Moscow to be circumcised.
Russia is Europe’s main external energy supplier, and disputes over natural gas have dominated discussions between Moscow and the 27-nation bloc for years. Friday’s talks yielded no significant progress, said a European Union official briefed on them.
In 2008, when Mr. Putin became prime minister and Dmitri A. Medvedev succeeded him as president, the tone at European summits improved, though the regular meetings rarely produced significant breakthroughs.
While Mr. Putin’s visit to Brussels, his first since his return to the presidency this year, produced no breakthroughs, it did avoid the angry polemics of some previous meetings.
After he returned to the presidency, Mr. Putin hosted a relatively harmonious meeting in St. Petersburg in June.
“We’ve had worse summits,” the official said.
“We want to deepen our cooperation at a global level: on challenges such as global economic governance, climate change or cooperation at the United Nations,” said Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Commission, in a statement ahead of the meeting. “Together the E.U. and Russia can make a decisive contribution to global governance and regional conflict resolution.”
Mr. Putin, who started his third term as president in May after taking a four-year break to serve as prime minister, dropped the combative language that has characterized previous appearances in Brussels. At the end of a joint news conference, he threw his arm over the shoulder of the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso.
A key issue at the summit is expected to be energy since the European Union nations buy about 20 percent of their natural gas from Russia.
The two men had earlier sparred over European Union energy regulations that Mr. Putin described as “discriminatory” but which Mr. Barroso defended as applying to all countries, not just Russia.
The union is investigating whether Gazprom, the Russian gas export monopoly, violated European antitrust laws by restricting European buyers’ right to sell gas to one another and by linking gas prices to oil prices.
The European Union has demanded that Gazprom open its export pipelines that run through member countries to other gas producers. This would include a new pipeline known as South Stream that Russia plans to build, though many doubt that Gazprom has sufficient money to finance the expensive project.
Union authorities can fine companies found in breach of antitrust laws 10 percent of their global annual sales, and they can order companies to change their business practices so they comply with European standards.
Mr. Putin complained that European energy regulation violated an earlier framework agreement on Russia-European Union economic relations. “It creates confusion and undermines confidence in our mutual work,” he said ahead of talks with Mr. Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, which represents the governments of the member states.
Gazprom has strongly contested those claims and has insisted that its pricing practices are in line with the rest of the industry.
The two sides also discussed, without making any progress, more recent quarrels over Russian restrictions on the import of cars and live animals from Europe. The European Union believes that these violate the rules of the World Trade Organization, which Russia, after 18 years of negotiation, finally joined in August.
The Europeans also have continued to push for development of the Nabucco pipeline, which would deliver natural gas to Europe from the Caspian region, bypassing Russia.
“Just a few months after joining the W.T.O.,” the European Union official said, “they want to throw the rules out of the window.”
The European Commission stepped up its support for rival pipeline projects after 2006, when Russia turned off the flow to Ukraine, an important transshipment country, in the dead of winter during a pricing dispute.
Russia is backing a competing project called South Stream, a pipeline that would run underneath the Black Sea and deliver huge amounts of Russian gas to the European Union, bypassing Ukraine. South Stream could go into operation in the second half of this decade.
Again, a key concern for Russia is European law on fair competition.
Russian government officials have hinted they want the European Union to exempt South Stream from some of those rules, which include sharing the pipeline with competitors, so that it can more easily move forward with such a hugely expensive project.
But union officials have expressed doubt about the viability of South Stream, suggesting it could be a strategic bluff by the Russians to put pressure on Ukraine.
