Politics, / By STA

Ljubljana - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will pay a working visit to the country on Wednesday to meet Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec and President Borut Pahor, the Slovenian Foreign Ministry has said.

Bilateral relations and economic cooperation will be in the focus of the meeting in Ljubljana, alongside current international topics including the Ukraine crisis, the situation in the Middle East, and Western Balkans, the ministry said on Friday.

After Slovenia, Lavrov will pay a two-day working visit to Serbia.

Erjavec and Lavrov meet quite often. At their last meeting in October in Moscow, they also discussed the arbitration award on the Slovenia-Croatia border.

At the time they labelled bilateral relations as positive, praising progress in economic and cultural cooperation.

Russia is an important economic partner of Slovenia's.

The volume of trade in goods and tourism exchange increased again last year, with trade in goods topping 635 million euro in the first ten months.

After reaching a record high of 1.47 billion euro in 2013, trade in goods dropped in the years to follow due to Russia's poor macroeconomic showing and EU sanctions against it, dropping below one billion euro in 2016.