Warsaw- Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski on Tuesday criticised President Lech Kaczysnki over a joint statement with Lithuania opposing a resumption of EU negotiations with Russia.

Sikorski said Kaczynski's joint statement issued late Monday with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus had not been cleared with the Polish government beforehand. Sikorski said he had only learned about the document from his Lithuanian colleague at the current EU foreign ministers' meeting in Marseille.

In the joint statement, Kaczysnski and Adamkus spoke out against a resumption of EU negotiations with Mosocw on a new partnership agreement. They said such talks would be "premature" in view of Russia's "ongoing occupation of Georgian territories."

The two leaders demanded that Russian forces must first be withdrawn to their positions of last August 7, before the hostilities with Georgia broke out.

Sikorski said the joint statment was "not good for Poland's negotiating position" and he appealed to Kaczynski not to encroach "from above" on the Warsaw government's room for maneouvre. He said Warsaw's position on the issue of negotiations with Russia had not yet been laid down.

The incident was the latest in the ongoing tussle between Kaczynski and the government of Premier Donald Tusk regarding who shapes Poland's foreign policy. In October, there was a bitter dispute between the two ahead of the EU summit in Brussels over who should actually attend the meeting.

Under the Polish constitution, the government is responsible for domestic and foreign policy. But it also gives the head of state some powers with regard to issues of national security. The dispute is ultimately to be resolved before Poland's constitutional court.

The EU member are awaiting a report by the EU commission before deciding on whether to resume negotiations with Moscow. That report is due just shortly before the scheduled EU-Russia summit in Nice on November 14. The EU froze the negotiations in the wake of Russia's military incursion into Georgia last summer.