MOSCOW (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued his toughest warning yet to Georgia to tackle Chechen fighters on its territory, but Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze dismissed his comments as biased.
Russian commentators and at least one top parliamentarian said Putin would secure widespread backing for his pledge to consider strikes inside ex-Soviet Georgia if Shevardnadze failed to take action against Chechen fighters in the rugged Pankisi gorge.

In the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Shevardnadze said he would summon Georgia's Security Council Thursday and meet parliamentarians to draw up a response to the Kremlin warning. He suggested new talks.

Putin used the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets to make what many analysts called an ultimatum. Russia, he said Wednesday evening, would consider launching strikes inside Georgia unless the ex-Soviet state took action to end "bandit" incursions across their common border.

"I am asking the military staff to provide proposals on whether it is possible and expedient to launch strikes on bases of terrorists reliably identified in intelligence operations," Putin said in a televised statement.

Russia, he said, had evidence that Chechen fighters in Pankisi had helped plan the attacks in the United States last year and were directly involved in 1999 blasts that killed 300 people in Moscow and other Russian cities. The Kremlin blames Chechen fighters for those explosions.

But Putin said there would be no need to use the U.N. Charter's "self-defense" clause if Georgia controlled matters.

"We cannot allow any more incursions into Russia with large loss of life," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Duma lower house of parliament's Foreign Affairs Commission, told NTV television.

"The president clearly knows what he is talking about. Parliament and public opinion will back him."

Shevardnadze dismissed the comments, saying his country was not responsible for the problem

PHOTO CAPTION

Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze speaks to the media during a news briefing in Tbilisi, September 11, 2002. Russian President Vladimir Putin has told his military to consider launching strikes inside Georgia if the former Soviet state fails to end rebel incursions across their common borders. . (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)