Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in the Russian city of Irkutsk on March 25 for peace treaty talks, the two leaders agreed during a phone conversation Tuesday.

Mori telephoned Putin and accepted a Russian proposal to hold the talks in late March, a Foreign Ministry official said.

Japan and Russia originally agreed to hold summit negotiations on Feb. 25 and 26, during Foreign Minister Yohei Kono's visit to Moscow in January.

Just hours after Kono left Moscow for Tokyo, however, Russia requested that the talks be postponed for about a month.

In protest at this perceived diplomatic discourtesy, Kono later told his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, that he could not accept Russia's request and that Russia should reconsider holding the meeting as scheduled.

With Russia showing little readiness to backtrack and hold the talks in late February, opinion grew within the government that the two countries should have a cooling-off period and hold the summit meeting in April or May.

Japan decided, however, to accept Russia's proposal in order to maintain the momentum of negotiations regarding a decades-old territorial dispute over four islands off Hokkaido that were seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.

Japanese officials hope that Mori and Putin will be able to map out plans for future negotiations in Irkutsk, after the target for signing the bilateral peace treaty expired at the end of 2000.

The prospect of the two sides narrowing their differences over the dispute, however, remains dim. Japan is demanding that all four islands be returned, while Russia is reluctant to accede to this demand.