(LJUBLJANA) - Five European Union foreign ministers will travel to Georgia next week to try to help to cool tensions with Russia over the separatist region of Abkhazia, Slovenia said Friday.

Ministers of Slovenia -- the current EU president -- Sweden, Poland, Lithuania and Lavtia were expected in the team, according to diplomatic sources in Brussels.

"We want to check what the real situation is and prevent an escalation of tensions," said Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country currently holds the EU presidency.

"We want to prevent any unpleasant or dangerous thing from happening," he told a news conference.

Rupel will be one of the five. He would not confirm the others, but diplomatic sources in Brussels said the foreign ministers of Slovenia, Sweden, Poland and Lithuania would visit Georgia Monday in the first attempt by senior EU officials to mediate between the ex-Soviet republic and its estranged neighbour Russia.

In Riga, a spokeswoman said Latvia's Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins would join the EU mission.

A Swedish diplomat meanwhile confirmed that Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt would take part.

Tensions have been mounting over the Georgian separatist region of Abkhazia, where Russia -- seen as backing the separatists -- has military forces.

They reached new heights Thursday as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili warned of a risk of war with Russia.

Rupel said Friday: "We need to clear (the situation) up as soon as possible, remove that possible danger, and try to contribute to a peaceful solution."

"We are in permanent talks with Russia. The European Union is like a big buffer organisation, an organisation that seeks reasonable solutions" to conflicts, he said.

The delegation would voice no preferences for any of the candidates in parliamentary elections to be held in Georgia on May 21, he said.

"The European Union has no intention of giving its support to one candidate or the other in the pre-election campaign," he said. "That would be wrong."

In Riga, Latvia's President Valdis Zatlers on Friday urged the international community to head off the spectre of conflict.

By "leaving Georgia alone at this moment, we allow the conflict to heat up," he said.

In Brussels, an EU spokeswoman said experts of the EU Satellite Centre in Spain would travel to Georgia to help investigate recent incidents involving Georgian drones overflying the rebel region of Abkhazia.

The Abkhaz leadership has claimed the downing of five unmanned Georgian spy planes in the last two months, while Georgia has only acknowledged one such shooting, carried out it said by a Russian fighter jet.

Abkhaz officials said Friday that an unmanned Georgian spy plane it shot down the day before was carrying an air-to-air missile.

Officials showed debris to journalists that they said was recovered from where the drone crashed, consisting largely of unidentifiable metal fragments.

"An expert mission should leave this weekend, at the request of the UN department for peacekeeping operations," said Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

"The United Nations has called for expertise from the centre to interpret images of the incidents. We have agreed and have told the experts to go. The idea is to verify and to help clarify what happened,"she explained.

"It's a way to contribute in a concrete way to calming the situation," she added.

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