Moscow - Russia opened its first liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant Wednesday on the Pacific coast in a bid to reach new clients in Asia and the continental United States.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the plant based on Russia's Sakhalin Island only about 160 kilometres from Japan's northern island of Hokkaido.

"It's a wonderful day, we have launched a large-scale project," Medvedev was quoted by Interfax as saying boisterously. "For us, especially, this is a new direction in our country's eastern policy."

It is the first visit of a Japanese premier to Russian soil since thousands of Japanese were expelled from the southern tip of Sakhalin Island during World War II, and underscores the importance of the LNG plant as an energy source for Japan.

The plant will produce some 9.6 million tons of LNG from Russia's Sakhalin-2 fields as it goes online next year, Russian news agencies reported.

The vast 20-billion-dollar Sakhalin-2 project is run by Gazprom since it acquired a controlling stake from British-Dutch oil major Shell in a controversial takeover in 2007.

Firms in the United States and South Korea have also signed long- term contracts to buy the gas from Russia.

But the plant will mostly supply Japan, which has been seeking to diversify its energy supplies to reduce its reliance on producers in the Middle East, which provide 7.2 per cent of the country's annual LNG imports.

Aso was quoted by Itar-Tass as praising Russia as a "constructive partner" in the Asia-Pacific region, and Japan was prepared to boost its cooperation with Russia despite the world economic difficulties.

Russian-Japanese ties have been troubled for years in a dispute over a cluster of resource-rich islands between the two countries, known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the southern Kurils. The Soviet army seized the sparsely-populated islands in the last days of World War II. (dpa)