It will be an intensive political and economic dialog, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier. "We are preparing materials, the political agenda will be quite packed," he said.
The leaders of Russia, Germany and France will discuss the situation in Iraq, the Middle East peace settlement and developments in Afghanistan.
According to a source in the Kremlin, a centerpiece of the talks will be Iraq. "Approaches of the three states to Iraq are similar and oriented towards mobilizing the international community's efforts to reverse the negative trend in the country's development," the source recalled.
"Similarly, they are expected to discuss possible ways to promote the Middle East peace settlement and to fulfill the Road Map of the four international mediators," he said.
Apart from this, the three presidents will consider developments in some other troubled regions of the world, including Afghanistan.
"The mechanism of their interaction harmoniously supplements different modern configurations of multilateral coordination of positions, without competing with or substituting them," the source emphasized.
According to him, the troika is based on a high level of transparency, readiness to cooperate with everyone who shares the philosophy of jointly shaping the future architecture of international security, which is in line with the international community's interests.
Moscow, Berlin and Paris are connected by a common desire to create a new system of international relations based on the multilateral principle with the central role of the UN and on international legislation, the Kremlin official pointed out.
Yet another crucial incentive for uniting is the three states' significant share of responsibility for the future of Europe. Accordingly, the main vector of trilateral cooperation lies within Russia-EU and Russia-NATO relations.
The trilateral format stems to a large extent from close or similar views on a broad range of modern problems, approaches to counteracting new threats and challenges, first of all international terrorism, drug trafficking, trans-border crime and WMD proliferation.
"The trilateral format allows generating more efficiently ideas of expanding both Russia's bilateral relations with France and Germany and our comprehensive interaction with the EU, oriented towards formation of four common spaces," the official explained.
Earlier the talks had been scheduled to start on Monday, but the French president had to postpone his trip to Russia for several hours due to two French journalists taken hostages in Iraq.
Today will see the fourth meeting of the European troika, as journalists have dubbed it.
The first informal meeting of the Russian, German and French presidents took place on March 26, 1998 in the Bor vacation home in the Moscow region.
Then Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac met on April 11-12, 2003 in St. Petersburg and, finally, on September 24, 2003 in New York.
