POIANA BRASOV, Romania — Russia agreed Thursday to send warships to help NATO's naval patrols monitoring suspicious vessels in the Mediterranean as part of a drive for closer counterterrorism co-operation between Moscow and the western alliance.

Two Russian ships are expected in the next few weeks to join NATO's Operation Active Endeavor, which was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States to prevent transit of terrorist individuals or material between North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

About two dozen NATO ships currently participate in the operation.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov and his NATO counterparts reached the agreement just after the end of the official 40-day mourning period for hundreds of schoolchildren and adults killed at a school hostage-taking in Beslan, southern Russia.

"The fight against terrorism, after the horrors of Beslan, is on the top of our agenda," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said after the talks.

He and Ivanov said the two sides would work on exchanging information, military training, joint exercises and standardizing equipment. "We want to have forces that can work together," de Hoop Scheffer told a news conference.

As an example of the co-operation, he said Russian officials were soon to attend talks on tightening defences against suicide bombings. The talks will be held at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Ivanov was upbeat at the level of military co-operation between the two sides, seven months after relations were strained by NATO's expansion to include seven eastern European countries, including the former Soviet-occupied republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

"The NATO-Russia council is working as planned," he said. "In the military field, joint meetings have become routine. We have one exercise after another."

Ivanov, however, rejected western criticism of the human rights situation in Chechnya, saying it had much improved lately. He warned against "double standards" on terrorism, suggesting some in the West were less stringent in opposing terrorists who attacked Russian targets.

He repeated Russia's assertion that it had the right to launch pre-emptive strikes against terrorists based outside its borders, and appealed to NATO countries to be more active in supplying information on foreign insurgents in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya.

As part of moves to strengthen Russia's southern flank, Ivanov said Russia would open a new military base in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. "It is no secret that there is a potential threat from this direction," he said. "This will also help protect those states that are Russia's allies in the region."

Russia has increased its engagement in formerly Soviet Central Asia since U.S. troops arrived, and Moscow opened an air base in Kyrgyzstan last year - its first new base abroad since the Soviet collapse.

Meeting in this Carpathian Mountain resort, the NATO-Russia Council also discussed President Vladimir Putin's drive to modernize Russia's armed forces and plans for increased co-operation between the Russian and NATO military.

Putin has made reforming the underfunded and demoralized armed forces a priority, but has run into opposition from the military establishment and has backtracked on his initial plan to fully phase out the unpopular draft. NATO has offered to help the reforms.