The newly inaugurated EU presidency of Slovenia could lead to a long-delayed agreement between the EU and Russia, New Europereports:

“Russia and the European Union are likely [to] move ahead toward starting negotiations on a new partnership and cooperation agreement at the beginning of 2008, head of the European Commission delegation to Russia Marc Franco said.”

Talks had been vetoed by Poland due to a dispute between it and Russia over Polish meat imports. Moscow dropped its import ban in December, and Slovenia took over the EU presidency January 1 amid high hopes for an EU-Russian agreement.

“We have a good feeling about this presidency. Slovenia is a close partner,” Sergei Yastrzhembsky, who is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on European matters, said. “There is not one cloud on the horizon of Russian-Slovenian relations” (ibid.).

Yastrzhembsky also said that if the EU could get past the Polish veto, “the long-awaited negotiations would possibly begin under the Slovenian presidency.”

Vasily Likhachyov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said negotiations for an EU-Russia agreement could begin “in the near future.”

The news comes alongside Russia and Germany beginning work in December on the Yuzhno Russkoye gas field in Siberia. Gas from the field will be piped into the Nord Stream pipeline to Western Europe. The article reports:

Dmitry Medvedev, the likely successor to President Vladimir Putin in 2008, said the new field strengthened Europe’s energy security and showed Russian openness to foreign partnerships. “It will make an important contribution to the energy security of Europe,” Medvedev said at a joint press conference in Moscow with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at which the two pressed a button starting production at the Russian-German project in northern Siberia.

The Trumpet has long expected talks between Europe and Russia to culminate in another pact that allows each to secure its shared border and direct its energies and resources to accomplishing other geopolitical goals. For more on this subject, read “Russo-German Pact Imminent.”