TBILISI, GEORGIA — The ongoing conflict over Georgia's breakaway regions prompted even harsher rhetoric from all sides Friday, including Russian anger over an accord to install a U.S. missile defense system in Poland.
As Moscow continued to insist on autonomy for the disputed Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev accused the United States of trying to encircle Russia by signing the agreement to install antimissile interceptors in Poland in the midst of the current crisis.
That agreement, which the U.S. says is aimed at preventing attacks from "rogue states" such as Iran, was finalized Thursday.
"The deployment of new antimissile forces in Europe has as its aim the Russian Federation," Medvedev said. "The moment has been chosen well. And therefore any fairy tales about deterring other states, fairy tales that with the help of this system we will deter some sort of rogue states, no longer work."
His sharp rebuke to Washington came on a day that the Bush administration dispatched its top diplomat to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi -- within 25 miles of Russian tanks -- to offer moral and economic support to the beleaguered U.S. ally.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Tbilisi to meet Georgian President Mi- kheil Saakashvili, who signed a formal cease-fire. She echoed President Bush's demand that Russian troops withdraw from Georgia.
Rice described Russia's incursion as an "attack," language sure to anger Moscow officials who insist that Georgia started the conflict over the fate of its secessionist-minded provinces that has spilled into Georgia proper.
"Russia needs to leave Georgia at once," she said. "This is no longer 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when a great power invaded a small neighbor and overthrew its government," she added, in reference to the Soviet Union's crushing of the "Prague Spring" liberalization movement.
But Russian officials sounded ever more defiant, vowing again that Georgia would never get back its breakaway regions.
"Unfortunately, after what has happened it is unlikely that the Ossetians and the Abkhazians will be able to live in one state together with the Georgians," Medvedev said at a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met the Russian president in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in an effort to defuse the crisis.
Medvedev said Russian peacekeepers would continue to guarantee the "will of the people" of the two disputed regions.
