Nato-Russia feud erupts over Georgia conflict

MOSCOW (AFP) - Nato-Russia relations plunged to their lowest point in years Tuesday over the conflict in Georgia and Russia’s failure to withdraw from the former Soviet republic.

The Russian military took 21 Georgian soldiers prisoner in the latest flaring of tension in Georgia.

As Western criticism intensified, Moscow pulled its navy out of joint exercises with Nato, while foreign ministers from the alliance declared that “business as usual” would now be impossible.

Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer accused Russia of failing to respect a French-brokered peace plan requiring both sides to move troops back to their positions before Georgia launched an offensive on the separatist region of South Ossetia.

This “is not happening at the moment,” the Nato chief said at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, attending the Nato meeting, said Russia was entirely to blame for its growing diplomatic isolation in the West. She said Moscow was isolating itself by “invading smaller neighbours, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreaking havoc and (carrying out) the wanton destruction of (Georgia’s) infrastructure.”

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shot back, calling the declaration approved at the Nato meeting “unobjective and biased.”