NATO foreign ministers agreed on Tuesday to gradually resume contacts with Moscow, suspended after Russia''s armed conflict with Georgia in August, the NATO secretary general said.

"Allies agreed on what I would qualify as a conditional and graduated reengagement with Russia," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.

"The NATO-Russia Council will meet on an informal basis to re-engage and to have discussions on the issues on which we will agree, and I would also like to add, on the issues on which we disagree," he said.

Russia''s NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin told reporters that an unofficial meeting off the Council could be held before the end of this month.

The NATO ministers also discussed the issue of granting Ukraine and Georgia admission to the Membership Action Plan (MAP), but failed to reach a consensus. Scheffer said both countries had shown progress towards NATO membership, but that considerable work needs to be done to meet the alliance''s standards.

However, he said: "We are going to beef up the NATO-Ukraine Commission" and "beef up the NATO-Georgia Commission."

NATO refused at its April summit to let Georgia and Ukraine into MAP, a key step for membership in the 26-nation alliance, but pledged to review the decision in December. The countries had received strong U.S. backing for their bids.

Earlier a NATO diplomat told RIA Novosti that MAP would be postponed for the two countries due to concerns over political instability in Ukraine, and over the August war between Georgia and Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week: "We believe that the NATO-Georgia commission and the NATO-Ukraine commission can be the bodies with which we intensify our dialogue and our activities," and that therefore "there does not need at this point in time to be any discussion of MAP."

Russia strongly opposes NATO expansion into former Soviet territory.