MOSCOW (AFP)--North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Russian relations plunged to their lowest point in years Tuesday over the conflict in Georgia and Russia's failure to withdraw from the ex-Soviet republic.
The Russian military took some Georgian soldiers prisoner and its navy pulled out of joint exercises with the western alliance as NATO foreign ministers declared "we cannot continue business as usual," after an emergency meeting on the Georgia conflict.
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.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shot back, calling the declaration approved at the NATO meeting "unobjective and biased."
He accused NATO of trying to rescue what he called the "criminal regime" of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, a close Western ally who is pushing hard to win his country membership in the alliance.
"It appears to me that NATO is trying to portray the aggressor as the victim, to whitewash a criminal regime and to save a failing regime," Lavrov told journalists in Moscow.
Russia's navy announced it was canceling participation in a NATO exercise in the Baltic.
In Georgia, Russian commanders insisted they had started to withdraw combat troops sent Aug. 8 to repel the Georgian attempt to retake control of South Ossetia, a tiny province on the mountainous Georgian-Russian border.
But there was little evidence to support the statements.
Seven armored vehicles and three tanks were seen leaving the town of Gori, which formerly housed a key Georgian army base near South Ossetia.
A senior Georgian official dismissed the Gori pullout as "a show aimed at creating the illusion of a withdrawal."
Russian tanks and checkpoints controlled the road to Gori and journalists coming from the capital Tbilisi were denied access into the town.
The Georgian military also complained that Russian forces Tuesday detained 21 Georgian soldiers in the western port city of Poti, which has been raided repeatedly by the Russians since the ceasefire.
Lavrov said a Russian pullout could be completed within "three to four days." The timing however would be linked to Georgia's full compliance with the terms of a ceasefire agreement.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, attending the NATO meeting, said Russia was entirely to blame for its growing diplomatic isolation in the West.
"When you start invading smaller neighbors, bombing civilian infrastructure, going into villages and wreaking havoc and (carrying out) the wanton destruction of (its) infrastructure, that is isolating.
"It is not an act of the United States or the European Union or anyone else to isolate Russia, it is what Russia is doing," she said.