MOSCOW, Oct 1: President Vladimir Putin ordered the Defence Ministry on Sunday to resume the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia despite last week’s arrest of Russian officers there, Russian news agencies reported.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Saturday it was suspending the scheduled withdrawal, because its troops’ security could not be fully guaranteed when they crossed Georgia. Russia is to pull out its troops from two local bases by the end of 2008.

The agencies, quoting Putin’s spokesman Alexei Gromov, also said Putin planned to hold consultations on the situation in Georgia with Russia’s leading political parties this week.

President Vladimir Putin accused Georgia on Sunday of “state terrorism with hostage-taking” in unusually harsh language suggesting a tough Russian response to Georgia’s arrest of four Russian officers last week for spying.

Putin’s comments followed an urgent meeting with armed forces chiefs, top ministers and the heads of intelligence services outside Moscow to discuss the worsening crisis between the two former Soviet states.

“As a result of his meeting with permanent security council members, the president termed the actions of Georgia’s leadership as an act of state terrorism with hostage-taking,” said a statement on the presidential website www.kremlin.ru.

Putin also compared Georgia’s moves against the officers to the actions of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s feared secret police chief, saying they were “a sign of the political legacy of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria”.

Beria, an ethnic Georgian like Stalin, ran the NKVD secret police which purged millions of Soviet citizens in the 1930s and 1940s and supervised Moscow’s atomic bomb programme.

Georgia had earlier accused Putin of secretly meeting Georgian separatist leaders and supporting their cause.

Since the row broke last week, Russia has pulled out its ambassador from Tbilisi, evacuated dozens of officials and stopped issuing visas to Georgians.

Putin did not say what additional measures Russia might take but his use of the terms “hostage-taking” and “terrorism” suggested a tough response. Moscow has traditionally taken an uncompromising stance to whatever it sees as terrorism.

Georgia accuses Russia of stoking separatist sentiment in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions of Georgia which broke free from central rule in the early 1990s and want to join Russia. Saakashvili wants to bring them back under his sway.

Georgian authorities said Putin had met the leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on Saturday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Putin was working from Sochi last week.

“This is an open support of separatism by Russia’s leadership,” Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili told reporters in Tbilisi.

Asked about the accusations, a Kremlin spokesman said: “We can neither confirm nor deny this information.”

However, both Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia were on a list of “foreign guests” at an investment forum in Sochi on Friday that was attended by Putin.

Russian moves against Georgia are likely to cause considerable financial hardship in its poor southern neighbour.—Reuters