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With Russia's backing for the G20 summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a new security and defence arrangement between the EU, Russia and the US to be agreed at a summit mid-2009, calling both on Moscow and Washington to refrain from deploying missiles until that date. Mr Sarkozy was speaking at a press conference on Friday (14 November) following the EU-Russia summit held in Nice, alongside his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.

"As acting EU council president I propose that mid-2009 we gather for instance within the OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] to lay the basis of what might be a future EU security arrangement ...which would of course involve the Russians and the Americans," Mr Sarkozy said, backing an idea originally proposed by his Russian counterpart.

EU leaders on Monday (1 September) agreed to postpone talks on a new EU-Russia partnership until Russian troops withdraw from Georgia following the insistence of a bloc of member states.

The talks on a new treaty defining the EU relations with Russia were scheduled to take place later this month, but pressed by the demand of several member states, it was decided this would be tied to Russian withdrawal from Georgia. The postponement modifies a previously circulated draft version of the summit's conclusion that took a softer stance on the issue of talks.

Poland – one of the countries pushing for the suspension – hailed the final declaration as a victory and insisted its position was not isolated. "We were not alone, we were acting within a group," including also the Czech Republic, the Baltic States - Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, the UK and Sweden, Polish President Lech Kaczynski told journalists.

The French EU presidency is expected to endorse the Russia-Georgia ceasefire, offer humanitarian aid and urge EU unity in a statement after an EU foreign ministers meeting on Wednesday (13 August), with Paris keen to avoid controversy on who to blame for the crisis. Preparatory discussions by EU diplomats on Tuesday saw a group of former communist states speak in "sharp language" about Russia, but the tone was "less radical than they used for their domestic press," one diplomat who attended the debates told EUobserver.