Unity over South Ossetia is EU's main challenge: Slovenia

(LJUBLJANA) - Getting all EU members to agree a common approach to the South Ossetia crisis will be a significant test for current EU president France, Slovenia's foreign minister Dimitrij Rupel said Tuesday.

"That will be the toughest challenge (for France)," he told journalists ahead of Wednesday's meeting of EU foreign ministers on the South Ossetia crisis.

Slovenia held the six-monthly rotating EU presidency in the first half of 2008.

Rupel noted that there "differences" between old EU member states and newcomers that once belonged to the former communist bloc.

"The old EU members have rather moderate positions (towards Russia) while the younger ones, having had experiences with Russia in the past, feel more strongly," Rupel said.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania -- which were part of the old Soviet Union -- as well as Poland and Ukraine have all strongly backed Georgia against Russia in the latest crisis.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been leading Western diplomatic efforts to halt the Russian military campaign against Georgia, meeting Tuesday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow.

In Tblisi on Monday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner persuaded Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to sign up to an EU-backed peace plan.

Slovenia, as a former Yugoslav state that declared independence in 1991, has always backed Georgia's claims of sovereignty over its entire territory including South Ossetia, Rupel said.

But he refused to comment on Slovenia's position at Wednesday's EU meeting.

"Our experiences with Russia in the past are not so bad," he said.

"But that does not mean we should not care about what is going on. We will listen very carefully to all the sides," he added.