GORI, GEORGIA — With Russia still defying U.S. demands to pull its troops from Georgia, the short, one-sided fight over two small mountain provinces widened Thursday into the sharpest exchanges yet between Washington and Moscow, threatening to unravel the post-Cold War consensus between them.
As Washington dispatched humanitarian relief, but no military aid, to its Georgian allies, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that unless Russian forces relented from their incursion into Georgia, "the U.S.-Russian relationship could be adversely affected for years to come."
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly told the Georgians to "forget about" recovering the two secessionist provinces whose unsettled fate triggered this month's fighting. Instead of withdrawing, as demanded a day earlier by President Bush, the Russian military plunged deeper into several towns in Georgia proper, Georgian officials said.
Despite official denials, Russian troops remained in control on the streets of Gori, a garrison city near the border with the rebel province of South Ossetia, setting up roadblocks into the city as Georgian forces looked on helplessly.
But the war over the Russian-backed provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may already be having wider repercussions. U.S. and Polish officials Thursday signed a preliminary agreement to install part of Washington's anti-ballistic missile defense shield in Poland, a system the U.S. says is aimed at protecting it and its European allies from attack by "rogue states" such as Iran, but which Moscow views as being directed against Russia.
The White House said the deal with Poland, hastily concluded after 18 months of negotiations, was not signed in response to the Russian incursion into Georgia. But the Bush administration has been scrambling to find concrete measures to match its rhetorical attacks on the more assertive posture of its former Cold War enemy.
Gates ruled out U.S. military engagement on behalf of Georgia, and said there were signs that Russian troops were preparing to withdraw. But at a Pentagon news conference, he described the Russian foray across the border in harsh language, accusing Moscow of aiming "to punish Georgia for daring to try to integrate with the West economically and politically and in security arrangements."
