(BARVIKHA) - Negotiations on a new EU-Russia partnership agreement could resume "as early as October," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday.

If measures agreed Monday on resolving the Georgia crisis come into force, "there is no reason that meetings between Russia and Europe, postponed for the month of September, could not be resumed in October," Sarkozy said.

"Things are perfectly clear: we want partnership and we want peace," Sarkozy added.

The EU last week froze partnership talks with Moscow until it withdraws its troops from Georgia.

The talks, begun in July, were aimed at agreeing a new framework for EU-Russia ties, to replace an accord from 1997, when Russia was still suffering economically from the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday agreed a detailed plan for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the deployment of European peacekeepers.

Sarkozy was in Moscow at the head of an EU delegation seeking to enforce the terms of a peace deal he brokered last month to end a five-day armed conflict between Georgia and Russia over the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, since recognised as independent by Moscow.

Russian troops entered Georgia last month to push back Georgian forces attempting to regain control of South Ossetia, the Moscow-backed region that broke away from Tbilisi in the early 1990s.

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