Washington

Reuters

08.10.08, 2:26 PM ET

RUSSIAN FEDERATION - (Recasts with U.S., Russian and Georgian envoys)

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 10 (Reuters) - The United States suggested on Sunday that Russia was interested in "regime change" in Georgia after Moscow rejected Tbilisi's offer of a cease-fire in the separatist region of South Ossetia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the president of Georgia "must go," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council.

Khalilzad then looked straight at Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and asked if Moscow was looking for "regime change."

"Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?" he said.

Churkin did not directly address the question but said there are leaders who "become an obstacle."

"Sometimes those leaders need to contemplate how useful they have become to their people," Churkin told reporters later.

"Regime change is purely an American invention," he said. "We're all for democracy in Georgia."

In Moscow, Lavrov said the departure of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was not a must to solve the crisis but that Russia no longer saw him as a partner.

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 10 – The war that has broken out between the Republic of Georgia and the Russian Federation calls attention to two features of that region which Western governments have been loathe to recognize and which, having failed to acknowledge, have led those governments to make statements that help explain and are compounding a looming tragedy.

On the one hand, the conflict over South Ossetia shows that Russia is not the status quo power the United States and the Europeans have wanted to believe that it had somehow become and that it cannot be transformed into one simply by constantly suggesting that it is and including it in various institutions intended for countries who want to make the current system work.

Instead, Moscow in recent years thanks in large measure to the rise of Vladimir Putin has emerged as a revisionist power ready, willing and increasingly able to challenge the 1991 settlement, especially when any of the governments of the former Soviet republics such as Georgia has just done act in ways that open the door to Russian aggression.

And on the other hand, precisely because the U.S. and its allies take their wishes about Russia for facts, Washington and to a lesser extent the European capitals routinely have made statements to the non-Russian governments that suggest the West will back them up in any dust up with the Russians.