(LJUBLJANA) - The foreign minister of EU president Slovenia praised Wednesday a decision by the bloc to open talks on a new partnership agreement with Russia.

"It is an important milestone," Dimitrij Rupel, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told a joint news conference with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodimir Ogrizek.

"It is essential that all member states agreed that negotiations could start. Problematic issues will continue to be the object of negotiations and will be solved along the way," he added.

Slovenia's EU presidency announced earlier on Wednesday that EU nations had given the green light for talks to open on the new partnership accord with Russia.

The decision will be formally approved by EU foreign ministers when they meet in Brussels on Monday.

The talks had been blocked for over 18 months, first by Poland, then by Lithuania, which had refused to let them start due to differences in areas such as energy and Russia's stance on "frozen conflicts" in states like Georgia.

The EU has been trying to update the existing accord -- a framework for Brussels-Moscow relations which is more than a decade old -- to take into account modern geo-political and economic realities.

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