WASHINGTON (AFP) — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Russia an "outlaw" Tuesday as she fumed over the country's refusal to immediately pull its troops out of Georgia.
"It's becoming more and more the outlaw in this conflict," she said in an interview with US network CBS News in Brussels, where she attended an emergency meeting of NATO foreign ministers on the Russia-Georgia conflict.
She said Russia was "clearly in violation" of a French-brokered ceasefire agreement that it signed with Georgia and that "its forces are behaving in a wholly inappropriate fashion in a neighboring state," according to a transcript of the interview provided by the State Department.
Rice said that the longer the Russian President Dmitry Medevdev was not keeping his word to withdraw troops from Georgia, "the reputation's just going to get worse and worse and worse."
Moscow, she warned, would "completely destroy its case for integration" into international institutions.
Medvedev on Tuesday issued a fresh commitment to withdraw Russian troops from Georgia as NATO-Russia relations plunged to their lowest point in years.
In a telephone conversation with French counterpart and current European Union President Nicolas Sarkozy, Medvedev vowed that all but 500 Russian troops would be pulled out of Georgia on Thursday and Friday.
Russian troops were sent in on August 8 to repel Georgia's attempt to retake control of South Ossetia, a tiny province on the mountainous Georgian-Russian border dominated by Moscow-backed separatists.
They proceeded to rout Georgia's army and occupy large swathes of the country before agreeing to a ceasefire one week ago.
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