West must stand up to Russia or risk crisis: Georgia

By Michael Stott and Margarita Antidze

TBILISI (Reuters) - The "moment of truth" has come for Europe to resist hardliners in Russia who are bent on stopping the spread of democracy in the former Soviet Union, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said on Thursday.

Moscow has sparked an international crisis by ordering extra troops and equipment to Abkhazia, a Black Sea province which threw off Georgian rule in the 1990s. It says the forces are needed as peacekeepers because Tbilisi plans an invasion.

NATO has dismissed the invasion claim and Washington says Russia's action risks destabilizing the whole Caucasus region, a key transit route for energy supplies to the West.

But Saakashvili told Reuters that Europe needed to react more strongly to stop the crisis escalating into a major threat to international peace and stability.

"This is not just an attack on a piece of Georgian territory," Saakashvili said in an interview, conducted at his half-finished new presidential palace on a hill overlooking central Tbilisi.

"This is an attack on what some politicians in Moscow regard as the dangerous virus of democracy and freedom spreading in Russia's neighborhood."

Russian President Vladimir Putin had sent in the troops and ordered closer links with the separatists because he wanted to punish the West for recognizing the independence of Kosovo and expanding NATO, Saakashvili added.

"They clearly have said -- and this was reiterated by Putin to me -- this is a response to the Kosovo precedent, this is a response to Western neglect of Russian positions and this is a response to the perceived threat of NATO enlargement in this region," Saakashvili said.

DIPLOMATIC ARSENAL

The Georgian leader said NATO's decision not to set Georgia and fellow ex-Soviet state Ukraine on the road to full membership immediately at a summit last month had sent a dangerous signal to hardliners in Moscow that they could act.

He urged Europe to use "all its diplomatic arsenal to deter the aggressive instincts of some politicians in Moscow", adding later that "these people have never reconciled themselves to the dissolution of the Soviet Union."

Putin hands over the presidency next week after eight years to his chosen successor and long-time ally Dmitry Medvedev, and Saakashvili said domestic Russian politics was contributing to Moscow's tough stance on Abkhazia and the other pro-Russian separatist province in Georgia, South Ossetia.

Saakashvili also faces a challenge on the home front.

Georgia holds parliamentary elections in just under three weeks but the president said he was confident of maintaining a majority for his ruling National Movement party.

The West's main election watchdog criticized last January's presidential election in Georgia, in which Saakashvili won a second term, and the opposition accused the president of rigging the result -- a charge he strongly denied.