(BRUSSELS) - European Union foreign ministers were seeking Monday to convince Lithuania and Poland to drop their opposition to resuming partnership talks with Russia, as fresh violence erupted in Georgia near the rebel region of South Ossetia.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, arriving for a meeting of European foreign ministers in Brussels, said he hoped key talks with Moscow could soon resume but that it would not be "business as usual".

Most EU nations would like to see the wide-ranging partnership talks, suspended after Russia's military campaign in Georgia in August, to be resumed before the end of the year, with hopes that an announcement can be made at an EU-Russia summit in Nice, southern France, on Friday.

However former Soviet satellites Poland and Lithuania have voiced continued opposition to the talks, saying Moscow has not complied with the terms of a peace deal which ended the short war.

Britain and Sweden put out a joint statement backing the talks while insisting on a strong negotiating line.

"There isn't a choice between either isolating Russia or ignoring their transgressions in Georgia," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told reporters.

"The right way is to have a hard-headed approach of engagement. We do not seek to isolate Russia, but equally we do not seek to ignore the concerns and the differences we have about their most recent behaviour."

"I think there is a possibility," that the talks could resume soon, said Solana as he arrived for the talks in Brussels, adding: "I hope very much that will be the case."

"That doesn't mean we are going to have business as usual. It will not be as usual."

The EU suspended its Russia talks on September 1 after Moscow launched its military campaign in Georgia the previous month.

While Russia has pulled its troops out of the heart of Georgia it has several thousand massed in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Moscow has recognised as independent.

"There is no doubt that there are troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that they have recognised as countries," Solana told reporters.

"Those forces are not peacekeepers. The peacekeepers that were there are no longer there but there are now Russian forces in numbers that are above the numbers there were as peacekeepers," he added.

Tensions were heightened in the region when two Georgian police officers were killed and three others wounded in bomb explosions on Monday near the rebel region of South Ossetia, according to the Georgian interior ministry.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also did nothing to assuage the Polish and Lithuanian misgivings when he threatened last Wednesday to deploy missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave bordering Lithuania and Poland.

Even if EU-Russia relations "sometimes meet with difficulties, there is only one way of talking concretely about these difficulties and that is to negotiate," said German state minister for European affairs Guenter Gloser as he arrived for the talks.

Luxembourg's Jean Asselborn, whose country strongly backs resuming talks with Moscow, assured that the European Union would "give the signal" in Nice for the talks to restart.

He added that European leaders would simultaneously stress "the problems we have with Russia".

The European Commission says it has a mandate for the talks and that, formally, no unanimous agreement is required to relaunch them, though it would prefer a united front.

The new EU-Russia pact will cover political, economic and trade relations between Europe and its major energy supplier.

The European Commission and most member states want it so as to present a united front in dealing with its often fraught ties with Moscow.

At present EU-Russian relations are governed by a 1997 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement reached when a much weaker Russia was emerging from the break-up of the old Soviet Union.

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