Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Saturday in Moscow to talk about bilateral economic cooperation and security issues.

North Korea is also likely to be high on the agenda days after Washington told Pyongyang it will not hold the first-ever U.S.-North Korean summit scheduled for June 12.

Abe and Putin are expected to discuss how to materialize their countries' joint economic activities in five areas, which they agreed on last September, on the disputed islands controlled by Moscow.

The two leaders are likely to agree to launch consultations to develop sightseeing tours involving travel agencies of both countries, culture sea urchins and farm strawberries, Japanese government sources said.

Japan hopes the activities would pave the way to settling the decades-long territorial row over the islands and, ultimately, signing a post-World War II peace treaty, while Russia aims to attract Japanese investments in the underdeveloped Far East region.

Abe expects Putin, who has renewed his grip on power following the presidential election in March, to make a landmark decision over the contested isles off Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido.

But it is still unclear whether the two neighbors will be able to come up with a "special framework" that will not compromise either side's legal position on the islands' sovereignty, a sticking point of the scheme.

(Abe (L) and Putin shake hands before talks in Danang, Vietnam, on Nov. 10, 2017)

The islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai islet group, called the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kurils in Russia, were seized by the former Soviet Union at the end of the war.

As part of humanitarian measures, Abe and Putin will also likely agree to allow former Japanese residents of the islands to visit their ancestral graves by aircraft again this year following the first such occasion last year, the sources said.

Apart from the five areas, Abe and Putin will likely confirm how far their eight-point economic cooperation package, which Abe proposed two years ago, has advanced, the sources said.

The Abe-Putin summit will be the first since the latter won a landslide victory in the presidential election in March and the 21st in total.

In the field of security, the two leaders may agree to hold the next round of the so-called two-plus-two talks involving the two countries' foreign and defense ministers in Moscow, following the previous session in March 2017 in Tokyo, the sources said.

On North Korea, Abe seeks Putin's cooperation in resolving the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by the North in the 1970s and 1980s.

Japan has been performing a delicate balancing act amid deteriorating ties between Russia and Western countries, in particular the United States, Japan's major ally, due partly to the Middle East situation.