AVIGNON, France — European foreign ministers met informally over the weekend in the palace here where popes once ruled, but the talk was mostly about the Third Rome, as the Russians like to call Moscow.

A senior European Union delegation, led by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is to go to Moscow on Monday to meet with the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Its goal is to get Russia to pull its troops out of Georgia and finally comply with the six-point cease-fire agreement the two men negotiated last month.

But there was significant doubt here that the Monday mission, deputized at an emergency European Union summit meeting on the Georgia crisis a week ago, would produce significant, concrete results.

“There’s a great deal to do, with a lot of details, and not much time on Monday,” said a European Union official who will travel with Mr. Sarkozy, who will also visit Georgia. Like several other officials interviewed for this article, he spoke on condition of anonymity according to diplomatic rules.

A senior French official said the mission could not resolve the entire crisis but had two main aims. The first is a withdrawal of Russian troops from what diplomats termed “Georgia proper,” the parts of Georgia beyond the boundaries of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two ethnic enclaves that Russian troops seized and Russia quickly recognized as independent.

The second is to get the Russians to agree to a European Union monitoring group, as the cease-fire agreement called for, and establish its area of responsibility.

The roughly 200 monitors, ideally with a United Nations mandate, would replace Russian peacekeepers in the security zone outside the two enclaves and in other disputed areas, so that Russian troops would pull back, as Russia had agreed, to positions they held before the crisis started on Aug. 7.

The Europeans want Russia to accept the appointment of a high representative to run the “international mechanism” overseeing the monitors, but Russia is likely to insist on involving the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in which it has a strong voice.

Then, under the cease-fire plan, talks are to start on the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, though details remain vague and must be negotiated.

The meeting’s participants had no ready answer to the Russians’ violation of Georgian territorial integrity, which the European Union has condemned as unacceptable, and no expectation that Russia would readily relent.

The phrase “Georgia proper” was frequently heard this weekend to describe Georgia without the enclaves. “I agree it’s a dangerous phrase,” the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said. “But the facts on the ground have been imposed.”

Mr. Sikorski was said to be the strongest voice inside the closed meetings for a hard line with Russia and a strong statement of support for Ukraine, which meets with the European Union on Tuesday.

On the sidelines, Mr. Sikorski said he favored giving Ukraine associate status in the European Union while “maintaining a European perspective” backing it for future membership in the bloc “even though it will take many years to fulfill the necessary criteria.”

The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, expressed concern as to whether Moscow would regard the boundaries of the two ethnic enclaves as “hard or soft,” specifically whether foreign monitors could work inside South Ossetia and Abkhazia to investigate reports of ethnic cleansing and violence against civilians.

The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, proposed an international inquiry into the outbreak of the war, an undertaking that Russia welcomes, having accused Georgia of aggression.

In response, Mr. Miliband said that he was more interested in how the war was conducted, and that “any allegation in respect of human rights abuse” should be investigated, a perspective that Georgia welcomes.

But the French, who currently hold the European Union presidency, left no doubt that they were annoyed with Russia for not abiding by the cease-fire. At a news conference on Saturday, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said of Mr. Medvedev: “Let him first respect his own signature. Of the six points, only two — or let’s say two and a half, perhaps three — have been implemented.”

While Poland, Britain, Sweden and the Baltic countries pressed for a hard line toward Russia, officials said that specific sanctions were not discussed. Mr. Kouchner also refused to discuss how the 27-nation group would respond if Russia continued to delay compliance.

“It depends on the Russian answer,” he said. There is no point, he said, in imposing “unuseful sanctions,” steps Russia could ignore.

“Sanctions are not our word,” he said. “We must find an understanding to solve this conflict.”

On Saturday, as Vice President Dick Cheney, at a conference in Italy, was speaking harshly of Russia and strongly in favor of admitting Georgia and Ukraine to NATO, and as Mr. Medvedev, in Moscow, boasted that Russia was now “a nation to be reckoned with” in what “became a different world after Aug. 8,” the Europeans were struggling to find the right message to send to Russia, which Mr. Kouchner described as a European partner and neighbor.

“We all have to calm this down to get the Russians to agree to anything,” one senior European official said. “The Russians won the war, and the problem won’t be solved without the Russians. They have the territory.”