Ecuador may ask Russia for a loan and sign a dozen contracts during Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa’s first official visit to Moscow on Thursday.

“There was such a request [from the Ecuadorian side],” Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday, commenting on a possible loan to the South American country. He gave no further details about the amount of the loan, saying loan negotiations had not yet begun.

Russia agreed to lend $1 billion to Venezuela in 2008 and has been considering extending a 1 billion euro ($1.5 million) loan to Serbia.

President Dmitry Medvedev is scheduled to meet Correa on Thursday and the two will preside over the signing of a raft of agreements on oil refineries, mining, utilities, agriculture and fishing, a source in the Kremlin told Interfax.

Russia has been courting Latin American countries, and the Ecuadorian president is one of the several Latin American leaders who have visited Moscow since December 2008 to renew high-level bilateral contacts.

Leaders of Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba have all visited Moscow over the past year, and Russia has been able to secure one of its key foreign policy objections from Nicaragua and Venezuela: the recognition of Georgia’s breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Correa is an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and has been warming to Russia in part as a reaction against a U.S.-Colombian security pact, which Correa says compromises regional security.

“The whole of South America is concerned” about the pact, he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Oil firm Zarubezhneft and utilities company Inter RAO, both state-owned, will discuss participating in joint projects in Ecuador, a source in the Energy Ministry told Interfax. “Everything is on the stage of preliminary discussions,” the source said.

On Tuesday, Ecuadorian Natural Resources Minister Germanico Pinto said his country’s companies were interested in working with Russian firms, adding that priority consideration would be given to state-owned companies.

A delegation from Zarubezhneft visited Ecuador in August, when they met the representatives of Petroecuador, a state-owned oil company.

Correa said in the interview that Ecuador was already purchasing two transport helicopters from Russia, which is financing the purchase, and hopes to purchase two more.

He also said Russia was the leading buyer of Ecuadorian flowers and bananas, and was a market with “big potential for Ecuador.”

“We hope to have many Russian companies coming to invest in Ecuador,” he said.