According to the Reuters newswire, in partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's political party, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs lobby has created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Internet telephony services,

The business lobby group says that Internet telephony services are encroaching foreign entities that the Russian government must control.

"Without government restrictions, IP telephony causes certain concerns about security," said the lobby's press release.

"Most of the service operators working in Russia, such as Skype and ICQ, are foreign. It is therefore necessary to protect the native companies in this sector and so forth," the release added.

Although Skype has declined comment, Reuters says that, in a presentation posted on the lobby's Web site, Vitaly Kotov, vice president of TTK, the telecommunications division of state-owned Russian Railways, called on regulators to stop Internet telephony services from causing "a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators."

According to Vedomosti, the Russian daily newspaper, meanwhile, delegates at the lobby group's meeting were warned that it has been impossible for police to spy on internet telephony conversations.

The lobby group has forecast that 40 per cent of Russian phone calls could be made through Internet telephony services by 2012.

As an alternative to Skype and its peers, the lobby group proposes that Russian phone companies develop their own Internet telephony applications and services, which they would "safely" make available to Russian citizens.