Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit Egypt and Algeria next week, he told journalists on Tuesday.
“Egypt is our strategic partner and so relations with it are very important,” he said on a plane to Moscow from Paris, where he had attended a G8 meeting on Libya earlier in the day.
Long-serving Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was deposed in recent unrest in the North African state, and Lavrov said Russia was “not indifferent to what goes on there.”
He also said that during the current wave of turmoil in the Middle East, contact was Egypt and Algeria, which has also seen protests, was “particularly relevant.”
Lavrov added that the trip was not linked to the G8 meeting, which failed to agree on a no-fly zone over Libya. He said the visit had been planned earlier.
MOSCOW, March 15 (RIA Novosti)