MOSCOW (AFP) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched Russia's long-awaited Siberian oil export route on Monday, hailing a "truly serious event" giving energy-hungry Asia a new supply source from the world's largest crude exporter.

Putin, clad in a heavy winter parka, pushed a button that initiated the first filling of an oil tanker at a new oil terminal near the Russian Pacific port of Nakhodka, the projected terminus of the new Siberian oil pipeline.

"For Russia this is truly a serious event," Putin said during the terminal inauguration ceremony at the port of Kozmino near Nakhodka, in comments broadcast on state television.

"This is a strategic project because it allows us to enter completely new, growing, promising markets of the Asian Pacific region," Putin said.

"This is the completion of one of the largest projects in modern Russia. And not only modern Russia. It would be a grandiose project for the former Soviet Union too."

Earlier this year, Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft completed the construction of the first 2,694-kilometre (1,600-mile) section of the oil pipeline known by the acronym ESPO linking Taishet in eastern Siberia with Skovorodino in the Amur region.

This portion of the project also included the construction of the Kozmino oil port inaugurated by Putin. The second, 2,100-kilometre (1,300-mile) section of the pipeline will run from Skovorodino to the Kozmino port.

For now, oil is being delivered by rail from Skovorodino to the Kozmino port where it is then to be pumped into tankers for shipment to markets in Asia.

Transneft and the Chinese oil group CNPC in October 2008 signed an agreement on the construction of a 67-kilometre (40-mil) branch line to China which will initially carry 15 million tonnes of oil a year when it becomes operational.

Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Uralsib Bank in Moscow, said the opening of the new route would give Russia new export outlets and ease "the threat to export growth... poised by the congested Bosphorus."

Russia has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world's top world oil exporter due to output quota cuts by the oil cartel OPEC and to new oil fields in Siberia coming on line.