LONDON (Reuters) - Slovak Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan said on Wednesday he expected the European Union would open accession negotiations with his country this year. He also said Slovakia was willing to consider helping the NATO alliance if required with operations in Kosovo. On a visit to Britain to drum up support for Slovakia`s EU and NATO membership bids, Kukan told reporters the reformist coalition that ousted hardline nationalist Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar in an election last September had already taken key steps to improve minority rights and civil liberties. Among several former communist central European states to be excluded from the first wave of EU and NATO enlargement, Slovakia under Mečiar was the only one left out because of its political and minority rights record. "I expect the EU will start talks with Slovakia this year, either before or after the (December) Helsinki summit," Kukan said, adding that he had been given that assurance by French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, dispelling concern that Paris might seek to delay the process. However he acknowledged that what he called four years of lost time, during which Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have negotiated membership of the Western military alliance and begun EU accession talks, could not be made up overnight. "We are told bluntly that four years cannot be compensated in three or four months. That is the realism which we are asked to understand," Kukan said. Western governments were asking about the stability of the new four-party coalition and concerned to assess the risks of a political comeback by Mečiar, he said. Although Slovakia would start its EU negotiations late, it hoped to join the bloc at the same time as the other central European states in the middle of the next decade, he said. Kukan, who visited the United States and France last week and is due to visit Bonn next week, said he had been told flatly in Washington that no new candidates would be invited to open negotiations for NATO membership when the alliance holds its 50th anniversary summit in April. He said Slovakia would be ready to consider opening its territory if needed to provide NATO with logistical support or overflight rights for operations in Kosovo, provided any military action was linked to a plan for a political solution. He discussed closer military cooperation with British Defence Secretary George Robertson and was due to meet Foreign Secretary Robin Cook later on Wednesday.