Japan and France will hold so-called two-plus-two security talks online among their foreign and defense ministers on Tuesday, the French Foreign Ministry has said.

The talks will focus on the strengthening of bilateral cooperation in the fields of security and defense, the situation in the Indo-Pacific region and the war in Ukraine, according to the ministry.

It will be the seventh two-plus-two meeting between Japan and France and the first since January 2022.

When Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and French President Emmanuel Macron met in Paris in January this year, they agreed to aim to hold the next two-plus-two meeting in the first half of 2023.