NATO ministers warn Russia: No ‘business as usual’
Posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
BRUSSELS, Belgium — After emergency talks here, NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday urged Russia to pull its troops immediately out of Georgia, saying there could be no “business as usual” between the alliance and the Kremlin until it withdraws.
After the meeting, NATO announced a new commission intended to strengthen the country’s ties with the organization. Details about the commission were lacking.
Reacting critically to the NATO statement, Russia said it was biased toward Georgia and NATO was trying to save a “criminal regime” in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, Reuters reported.
The warning for Russia to withdraw its troops came after days of mounting frustration among alliance nations at the Russian stance. Russia signed a French-brokered cease-fire, but Moscow has failed since then to remove its troops from key areas despite promises that it would.
The foreign ministers from the 26 NATO nations expressed concern over “continuing reports of Russia’s deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.” “Russian military action has been disproportionate and inconsistent with its peacekeeping role,” the ministers said in a statement after the meeting, urging Russia “to take immediate action to withdraw its troops from the areas it is supposed to leave.” “The alliance is considering seriously the implications of Russia’s actions for the NATO-Russia relationship,” they said. “We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual.” But the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said NATO was trying to “whitewash” the actions of Georgia’s government.
“NATO is trying to make a victim of an aggressor and whitewash a criminal regime, save a collapsing regime and is taking a path to the rearmament of the current leaders in Georgia,” Lavrov told reporters at a news conference.
He said Russian troops could be withdrawn from Georgia in three to four days but that would depend on how quickly Georgian troops returned to their permanent bases, Reuters reported.
Before the talks in Brussels, U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Moscow of bullying its neighbors with its far superior military power and of reverting to its Cold War behavior.
Rice said Monday that the United States would not push for Georgia to be allowed into NATO.
Instead, NATO foreign ministers were expected simply to affirm that they would like to see Georgia and Ukraine eventually start the process of getting into NATO, known as a Membership Action Plan, as the ministers did at an April meeting in Bucharest, Romania, she said.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain told reporters before the meeting that the priority was “to provide practical and political support to Georgia,” The Associated Press reported. The alliance must “ensure Russia does not learn the wrong lessons from the events of the last two weeks,” he said. “Force cannot be the basis for the demarcation of new lines around Russia.” Bush administration officials said they still hoped Europe would agree to let Georgia begin the process of joining NATO in December, but they allowed that the probability was even lower than it was in April, when France and Germany blocked a similar request from President Bush for Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia is deeply opposed to NATO expanding to include Ukraine and Georgia, countries that it considers to be well within its traditional sphere of influence, and is not that happy about the alliance’s expansion into eastern Europe, either.
The NATO charter says that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all, which could well have led to a military confrontation with Russia if Georgia were already in NATO.
So instead of accelerating Georgia’s NATO membership, Rice said, the NATO foreign ministers would seek other ways to demonstrate their ire with Moscow. She said they would look at what they could do to support Georgia, including rebuilding its infrastructure and, a senior administration official said, its military.
The Bush administration may also try to ramp up its own military aid to Georgia, the official said, and begin selling the Georgians hand-held anti-aircraft devices — but not necessarily Stinger missiles — to defend against Russian air attacks. Officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have been pushing that for several months, while Rice has demurred, saying that such an action would unnecessarily provoke Moscow.
“But now Russia’s actions have turned even the doves into hawks,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. Information for this article was contributed from New York by Graham Bowley of The New York Times.
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