MOSCOW, September 26. /TASS/. Sanctions, as well as speculations about the protection of human rights or Euro-Atlantic values, are being used by the West as an instrument of unfair competition on energy markets, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the plenary session of the Russian Energy Week.

The Western countries, he said, "thought that they would manage to disrupt access to these services for those countries that are not politically favorable to them."

"In this way they hoped to push them to the sidelines of progress - in fact - to oust them from the market," he explained. "All these tools are used primarily for unfair competition."

"The motive is obvious: the West does not want competition because it cannot cope with it. It often loses in a fair fight. It resorts to discrimination, which it cloaks in the garb of ostensible Euro-Atlantic solidarity, the campaign for human rights and so on," Putin said. "Such pretexts are many."

According to the Russian president, the West is in the habit of being an uncontested the leader, because historically "the main elements that provide the infrastructure of the global energy market have been concentrated in its hands." Among them, Putin mentioned "innovative solutions for the extraction of raw materials, logistics, insurance of resource supplies, as well as a system of payments for these operations - all that along with technology, forms a kind of platform for the global energy industry."