Obama reaches out to Georgian leader Saakashvili

TBILISI (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has called Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to assure Moscow's outspoken foe of Washington's continued support, the Georgian leader's press service said Tuesday.

Russia's chilly ties with the West cooled further after its war with Georgia in August, when Russian troops launched a massive counter-attack in support of rebels following Tbilisi's attempt to retake one of its breakaway regions by force.

The United States has led harsh Western criticism over Russia's speedy recognition of Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and what it sees as Moscow's disproportionate use of force during the five-day war.

Democrat Obama, who defeated Republican presidential hopeful John McCain in a November 4 election, called the Georgian leader on Monday, a spokesman for Saakashvili said.

"The conversation was friendly and touched upon future relations between Georgia and the U.S.," Saakashvili's press service said in a statement posted on the presidential Web site www.president.gov.ge.

"Obama underlined that he supports Georgia's territorial integrity and paid attention to the importance of continuing reforms in Georgia," it said. "Obama expressed the hope that the two leaders would meet in the near future."

Tbilisi's U.N. envoy said Monday he expected Obama as a new U.S. leader would maintain strong U.S. support for Georgia's NATO ambitions.

Outgoing President George W. Bush had pushed for swift acceptance of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, a position that failed to win unanimous support among European NATO members and strained ties with Russia long before its war with Georgia.

With the Bush administration's influence wavering, U.S. and European officials have said Washington is now studying whether NATO could give Georgia something short of a formal path to membership to satisfy European opposition to offering Tbilisi a so-called Membership Action Plan.

(Reporting by Niko Mchedlishvili; Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Jon Boyle)