Sarkozy, who presided over an EU summit in Brussels, said Moscow was broadly honouring a ceasefire deal with Georgia, following Russia's military campaign there in August, and thus the frozen partnership talks, covering everything from energy supplies to human rights, should restart.
"Must we create another Europe-Russia crisis?" said Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency.
"That doesn't seem reasonable to me," he told reporters at a post-summit press conference.
EU members Lithuania and Poland believe Russia has not gone far enough to satisfy the peace deal which Sarkozy helped to broker.
They argue that Russia has massed troops in the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Moscow has also recognised as independent.
As he arrived for the summit, which lasted over three hours, Lithuania President Valdas Adamkus was clear that the key points of the peace deal "were never actually fulfilled."
"So the question: is are we going to have agreement without any fulfilment of the commitments that were made?"
Sarkozy said he had told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev of "my strong concerns" at his recent announcement on the deployment of missiles in the Kaliningrad area close to Poland and Lithuania.
However, he stressed that "to express reservations or to show disagreement, it is better to be able to see each other, to talk.
"It is even better to make yourself understood rather than to be ignored or to refuse to talk."
European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, addressing the joint press conference, took up the call.
"I say to my Polish and Lithuanian friends, it is better for us to have a united European position when we speak with Russia, a position which is perhaps not 100 percent of what you would have wanted, than to have three or four positions from Europe when it talks to Russia".
Calling for the negotiations to resume he added that, by speaking with a unified voice, Europe "undoubtedly has much more influence to defend our interests and promote our values."
On Wednesday Medvedev announced the deployment of Iskander short-range missiles in the western Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
He said the deployment would counter a US anti-missile system to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic by 2013-2014, sounding a warning shot to US president-elect Barack Obama and Washington's allies in central Europe.
EU foreign ministers will meet Monday to debate whether to resume partnership talks with Moscow, frozen in September over the Georgia conflict, ahead of an EU-Russia summit in Nice, southern France, on November 14.
The commission has stressed that its mandate to negotiate with Russia has not been taken away, while saying it would like agreement from the member states before resuming the talks.
Russia is the EU's third largest trading partner, with growth rates of up to 20 percent per year, while the EU is also the biggest investor in Russia.
At present EU-Russian relations are governed by a 1997 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement reached when a much weaker Russia was emerging from the break-up of the old Soviet Union.