The US-British summit in Northern Ireland will be the third in three weeks for the two leaders who embarked on the Iraq war without explicit approval from the United Nations, and defying opposition from France, Russia and Germany.

Conscious of the international opposition to the war, Blair has also been instrumental in recent weeks in pushing the US leader to make a greater commitment to the Middle East peace process, which will also be discussed at the summit.

Blair has said that Britain would seek fresh UN Security Council resolutions to guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity, ensure humanitarian aid quickly reached civilians in need and approve a post-war administration for Iraq.

But Bush and Blair differ over the role the United Nations should play in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

While Blair has called for the United Nations to have a central role, Bush officials want to keep it as an exclusive affair of the countries that participated in the overthrow the Saddam regime.

"It would only be natural to expect that after having participated and having liberated Iraq with coalition forces, and having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, that the coalition intends to have a leading role," US national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

Rice, who is fluent in Russian, is in Moscow for a meeting Monday with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, and Security Council chief Vladimir Rushailo, according to the Interfax news agency.

A US official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said Rice would also meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before travelling onto meet up with Bush in Northern Ireland on Monday or Tuesday.

"We're committed to our long-term strategic relations with Russia," said White House spokesman Taylor Gross. "We've been through some difficult times, and we look forward to exchanging views with the Russians on how best to move forward."

US officials said that Rice will give Putin reassurances after a vehicle convoy carrying Russian diplomats -- including ambassador Alexander Yakovenko -- on its way from Baghdad to Syria was caught in a shoot-out between US and Iraqi forces.

Five Russians were injured in the shoot-out, a Russian foreign ministry spokesman said late Sunday.

Titorenko was not injured, "although he has been scratched," the spokesman said added.

The US State Department said that Secretary of State Colin Powell called his Russian counterpart promising that an investigation into the incident was underway.

And General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon was investigating.

Russia has been attempting to tone down its outspoken criticism of the war in recent days, saying it did not wish to see a US defeat.

It nevertheless joined France and Germany in making a strong call for a UN-backed administration in Iraq -- something that Rice dismissed on Friday.

The US plan currently calls for General Tommy Franks, the main war commander, to run post-war Iraq to run under a military administration until an interim Iraqi administration can take over. But there have been divisions in Washington over the plans.

US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Sunday that the US military may have to run Iraq for more than six months after the war has finished before it hands over to an Iraqi authority.

Wolfowitz said it took six months to form a government in the virtually autonomous northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. "This is a more complicated situation; it probably will take more time than that," he said.

"The reconstruction of Iraq, I think, is going to be one of the most important projects for the international community in many years. And the UN can be a mechanism for bringing that assistance to the Iraqi people," Wolfowitz said.

"But our goal has got to be to transfer authority and the operation of the government as quickly as possible not to some other external authority, but to the Iraqi people themselves," Wolfowitz said.

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