U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday Russia may have
already seriously damaged its international standing with its military
over-reaction to the situation in South Ossetia. Rice spoke to Washington
reporters hours before her scheduled departure on a crisis mission to France and
Georgia to try to bolster European-led mediation efforts. VOA's David Gollust
reports from the State Department.
Rice, who is due to confer Thursday with French
President Nikolas Sarkozy on his Georgia peace-making efforts, again stressed
U.S. concern that Moscow may not be honoring the cease-fire commitment it made
to the French leader.
The Secretary, echoing earlier comments by
President Bush, called on Russia to halt its military operations and other
activities that threaten its neighbor's sovereignty and territorial integrity,
and to cease rhetoric about ousting Georgia's democratically-elected
government.
She declined under questioning to specify consequences for
Moscow if it fails to heed such demands other than to say that it would add to
the international isolation Moscow already finds itself in:
"It will only
serve to deepen the very strong, growing sense that Russia is not behaving like
the kind of international partner that it has said it wants to be," said
Condoleezza Rice. "And it's very clear to me that the consequences of that -
which are already quite significant because of the way that Russia has brutally
pushed this military operation well beyond the bounds of anything that that
might have related to South Ossetia - calls into question Russia's suitability
for all kinds of activities that it has said that it wants to be a part
of."
Rice said Russia seriously over-reached by engaging in aerial
bombing of Georgian cities and other activities that she said could not possibly
be associated simply with protecting its peacekeeping forces and other interests
in South Ossetia.
The Secretary, who was a Soviet-affairs expert in the
first Bush administration, said she recognizes that the Russia of today is not
the Soviet Union, but also suggested bluntly that the current Russian leadership
should recognize that the Cold War tactics will not succeed in
Georgia:
"This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where
Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and
get away with it," she said. "Things have changed. And so what I think Russia is
seeing is that to the degree this is about South Ossetia, about even Abkhazia,
let's accept that it is time to end the fighting, move the forces back to August
6th [positions] and then have a international mediation to try to resolve these
conflicts within the context of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
Georgia."
Rice is to meet President Sarkozy in southern France to discuss
his just-completed mediation mission to Tbilisi and Moscow, and holds additional
talks later Thursday in Paris.
She then goes on to the Georgian capital
for a high-profile show of support for the government of President Mikhail
Saakashvili.