Georgia to cut diplomatic ties with Russia

Protests troops on its territory

TBILISI, Georgia - Georgia said yesterday that it will sever diplomatic ties with Moscow to protest the presence of Russian troops on its territory. Russia criticized the move, pinning blame for a breakdown in relations on Tbilisi.

Georgia's remaining diplomats in Russia will leave Moscow today, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nato Chikovani said.

Lawmakers had voted unanimously late Thursday to break off ties with Russia, branding it an aggressor country in their conflict over two Russian-backed separatist regions in Georgia.

Russia criticized the decision. "Breaking off diplomatic relations with Tbilisi is not Moscow's choice, and the responsibility lies with Tbilisi," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko as saying.

Russia will have to close its embassy in Georgia if ties are severed, the RIA-Novosti agency quoted an unnamed ministry official as saying. However, both nations' consulates will remain open - important for the many Georgian citizens living in Russia.

Adding to the tension, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Russia will not be isolated over its conduct in Georgia and warned Europe that it shouldn't cater to the United States.

"If European countries want to serve the foreign policy interests of the United States, in my view they won't win anything from this," Putin said in an interview with Germany's ARD television before a European Union meeting in Brussels on Monday about the Georgia crisis and relations with Russia.

French officials said yesterday that European Union leaders will not impose sanctions on Russia at the Brussels meeting even though some EU countries have pushed for them.

France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has said the EU is considering sanctions against Russia after its recognition of independence for two breakaway Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. France currently holds the EU presidency.

Kouchner told reporters that a provisional text for the Brussels meeting has been drawn up, and that his focus was on unity in the 27-member EU bloc.

In his interview yesterday, Putin also justified Russia's actions, saying it had defended the lives of its citizens during the war. "Such a country will not be in isolation," he said in an excerpts shown on state-run Russian television.

A lawmaker in South Ossetia, meanwhile, said Russia intends to eventually absorb the breakaway province at the center of the war that broke out Aug. 7 when Georgia sent troops into South Ossetia to wrest back control from separatists, prompting Russia to send in hundreds of tanks and troops.

The five days of warfare ruined already frayed Georgia-Russia ties and caused the biggest crisis in Moscow's relations with the West since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Russia described Tbilisi's military offensive as blind aggression, saying the move deprived Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili of the moral authority to defend his country's territorial integrity.

Georgia and the West in turn criticized Russia for pressing further into Georgia proper and for ignoring a cease-fire brokered by the European Union.

This week, Moscow announced that it will recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist Georgian region with strong ties to Russia, as independent states.

South Ossetian parliamentary speaker Znaur Gassiyev said Russia will absorb South Ossetia within "several years" or earlier.

He said that position was "firmly stated" by both the province's leader, Eduard Kokoity, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in talks in Moscow earlier this week.

In Moscow, a Kremlin spokeswoman said Friday there was "no official information" on the talks.

A Georgian lawmaker said his country will eventually regain control of South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia.

"The separatist regimes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the Russian authorities are cut off from reality," Gigi Tsereteli said in Tbilisi. "The world has already become different and Russia will not long be able to occupy sovereign Georgian territory.

"The regimes of Abkhazia and South Ossetia should think about the fact that if they become part of Russia, they will be assimilated and in this way they will disappear," he added.

Russian soldiers sealed off the tiny province's unofficial, yet vital, trade routes to Georgia proper after the de facto borders were fortified. It is now a place effectively cut off from the outside world - save a three-lane tunnel that burrows through the Caucasus range and into North Ossetia and Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that there was no reason South Ossetia could not exist as an independent state, and that recognition was not meant as a prelude to Russian absorption. But he did not expressly rule it out.

"Soon there will be no North or South Ossetia - there will be a united Alania as part of Russia," South Ossetia's deputy parliamentary speaker Tarzan Kokoiti said, using another name for Ossetia.

"We will live in one united Russian state," he said.