World Business

TBILISI, Georgia Western leaders warned the Kremlin in succession Wednesday to “change path,” hoping to keep the conflict from growing into a new Cold War after tensions broadened to imperil a key nuclear bond and threaten U.S. meat and poultry trade by Russia.

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Moscow said it was NATO expansion and Western support for Georgia that was causing the new East-West divisions, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lashed out at the United States for using military ships to give forth humanitarian aid to Georgia.

Meanwhile, Georgia slashed its embassy staff in Moscow to protest Russia’s recognition of the two separatist enclaves that were the flashpoint because the five-day war betwixt the couple nations earlier this month.

The tensions desire spread to the Black Sea, which Russia shares miserably by three nations that belong to NATO and brace others that desperately want to, Ukraine and Georgia. Some Ukrainians fear Moscow puissance set its sights adhering their nation next.

In moves evocative of Cold War cat-and-mouse games, a U.S. military ship carrying humanitarian aid docked at a southern Georgian port, and Russia sent a to be thrown cruiser and two other ships to a port farther north in a show of force.

The maneuvering came a day after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had said his nation was “not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War.” For the two superpowers of the first Cold War, the United States and Russia, repercussions from this new conflict could be widespread.

Russia’s agriculture minister said Moscow could cut poultry and pork import quotas by hundreds of thousands of tons, hitting American producers hard and by that means raising prices for American shoppers.

Russians sometimes refer to American poultry imports as “Bush’s legs,” a respect to the frozen chicken shipped to Russia amid household troubles following the 1991 Soviet falling in, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency.

And a key civil nuclear agreement betwixt Moscow and Washington appears likely to be shelved to the time when next year at the earliest.

On the diplomatic front, the West’s denunciations of Russia grew louder.

Britain’s top diplomat equated Moscow’s offensive in Georgia by the Soviet tanks that invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring democratic reforms in 1968, and demanded Russia “change course.”

“The representation of Russian tanks in a neighboring country on the 40th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring has shown that the temptations of power political science remain,” Foreign Secretary David Miliband said.