Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas was due to meet President Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in a quest to bolster Russian support for the increasingly isolated Palestinian Authority.
The Kremlin press service said the meeting would take place Monday at 1:00 pm (0900 GMT) at Putin's residence here.
The Palestinian president arrived at Sochi, a favourite Kremlin retreat, late Sunday, and was due to head to Strasbourg for an address to the European parliament planned Tuesday.
Russia has emerged as one of the Palestinian Authority's key supporters since the radical Islamist group Hamas swept parliamentary elections there in January, sparking international outcry.
Abbas hopes to reinforce those links.
His tour also follows agreement by the four sponsors of the stalled Middle East peace process -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- to establish a temporary trust fund that would enable donors to supply aid without having to deal directly with Hamas.
‘We will talk about strengthening relations between our peoples (and) resolving the Palestinians' financial problems,’ Abbas told the Russian newspaper Izvestia in an interview Monday.
‘This is a meeting of two friends,’ the Palestinian ambassador to Russia, Baker Abdel Munem, said.
Moscow has not followed the US and European lead in boycotting Hamas and suspending direct financial aid. Leaders of Hamas, described as ‘terrorist’ organisation in Israel, Washington and the European Union, were invited to Moscow in March.
However, Abbas' Fatah faction and Hamas are also bitter rivals and Abbas was expected to try to bolster his own position.
‘This visit is very important for Abbas,’ said Alexei Malashenko, an expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center policy think tank.
‘He is going to do his utmost to convince Moscow that Hamas is only a temporary partner’ and is coming to talk with Putin ‘to see to what extent Russia really supports Hamas,’ Malashenko said.
Where Moscow stands in its relationship to the Palestinians remains unclear.
‘Russia faces a choice,’ according to Malashenko. ‘It has to decide who it supports: Abbas or Hamas.’
According to Yevgeny Satanovsky, who heads Moscow's Middle East Institute and is close to several Russian Jewish organizations, Russia should embrace Abbas.
Hamas' tenure so far at the head of the Palestinian government has resulted in ‘civil war, economic collapse and disillusionment,’ Satanovsky said, referring particularly to clashes between Hamas and Fatah that on May 8 and 9 left three dead and more than 20 wounded.
Abbas is ‘one of the few people’ who could stop the chaos, Satanovsky said.
Others in Moscow's elite disagree, arguing that cutting support to Hamas would mean toeing the Israeli line.
‘Russia was right to invite Hamas leaders to Moscow,’ wrote Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister, spymaster and an expert on the Middle East, in an opinion piece published Friday by the Vremya Novostey daily.
Labelling Hamas a ‘terrorist’ group is just a pretext to serve US and Israeli interests, he added.
‘The Hamas scarecrow is useful to those who, within the Israeli leadership... want a unilateral settlement,’ Primakov wrote, accusing Washington of ‘scaring off’ other players into labelling Hamas a ‘terrorist’ group, as opposed to a ‘nationalist’ movement