NATO and Russia will resume their formal political talks on Wednesday with a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) at the ambassadorial level.

The NRC meeting, scheduled for the afternoon, will be the first formal one since August 2008 when NATO angrily suspended all high-level political contacts with Russia following its armed conflict with the Caucasus nation of Georgia.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said he was looking forward to the meeting, although that does not mean NATO and Russia will suddenly agree on everything.

"There are a number of issues where we should seriously work together. But we should not shy away from difficult issues where we fundamentally disagree," he told reporters after a meeting with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev.

"The NATO-Russia Council is not a fair weather body," he said.

De Hoop Scheffer said the two sides should work together in weapons non-proliferation, Afghanistan, and the fight against terrorism. But they still have fundamental differences over issues such as the territorial integrity of Georgia and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, he said.

Following the brief war in August 2008, Russia recognized the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. Russia's position was condemned by NATO.

The meeting will also open the way for an NRC meeting at the ministerial level on May 19. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed the meeting in May on Tuesday in Luxembourg, where he was having talks with European Union officials.

Wednesday's NRC meeting comes at a time of uneasy relations between NATO and Russia over the alliance's military exercises in Georgia between May 6 and June 1.

NATO has said the exercises were planned well before the Russia-Georgia conflict and Russia had been invited to participate. But Moscow has refused to send observers and insists that the exercises could be interpreted as the alliance's support for Georgia.

(Xinhua News Agency April 29, 2009)