Brussels - European Union summits are traditionally the time when tough decisions are made and Europe's fractious nations try and find a common response to crises.

With a financial crisis raging, relations with Russia rocked by war and the EU rudderless after Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, the bloc's leaders will have plenty on their plates when they hold their autumn summit in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday.

"The EU is constant crisis management, we go from one crisis to another. This is one of the biggest that we've had for a long time, now we need to calm things down," Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said at a meeting with EU colleagues on Monday.

Top of the agenda in Brussels will be the question of how far the EU can work as a bloc to restore confidence to financial markets traumatized by the worst falls in almost 80 years.

Ahead of the summit, EU leaders have raced from meeting to meeting in a desperate bid to save their financial systems from meltdown, while member states have scrambled to prop up their banking sectors.

Despite their assurances, stock markets plummeted, leaving European leaders groping for a response.

On Friday, a draft version of the forthcoming EU summit's conclusions seen by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa vowed to "take all measures to protect the stability of the financial system and assure in all circumstances the protection of deposits."

It further called for "holding managers and shareholders responsible" and for an international summit "in the nearest future."

But on Sunday, following a briefing from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the leaders of the 15 countries which use the euro in an unprecedented meeting put forward a joint plan aimed at boosting financial confidence by guaranteeing loans between European banks.

That in turn was followed by reports that France and Germany were to post inter-bank loan guarantees topping 770 billion euros (1,000 billion dollars) on Monday.

The plan, which followed a British guarantee worth 250 billion pounds (425 billion dollars) and a G7 plan to unblock credit markets, was met with stock-market surges around the world.

Diplomats say that the EU summit is now likely to throw its weight behind the euro-group decision rather than proposing new measures - especially since the EU's largest non-euro-user, Britain, has led the charge on bank guarantees and its second-largest, Poland, is set to announce an interbank guarantee system on Tuesday.

The second crisis on the EU's agenda is the summer's Russian-Georgian war, with EU leaders set to discuss whether or not they should re-open talks with Russia on a key strategic partnership which they froze in the wake of the conflict.

At an emergency summit on September 1, the leaders agreed there would be no further talks "until troops have withdrawn to the positions held prior to 7 August," the day fighting began.

Russia withdrew from so-called "buffer zones" outside Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on October 9, but has more than doubled its troop levels in the regions and has occupied formerly Georgian-held positions there - leaving EU states at odds over whether the September 1 conditions have been fulfilled.

"For me it's very clear, we have to start the negotiations because the spirit of the (peace) agreement has been fulfilled," Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said Monday.

"If you look at the maps, (the Russians) are not back to the positions they held prior to August 7," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt retorted.

Finally, the summit is set to hear a report from the Irish government on the country's rejection of the EU's Lisbon Treaty in a referendum on June 12, which threw the bloc into institutional panic.

However, diplomats say leaders are not likely to push for any decision on how Ireland should react to the vote, postponing such a move until later in the year.