Russian President Dmitry Medvedev chided “senile” US senators on Friday for urging Moscow to withdraw troops from Georgia's breakaway regions. The Senate resolution reiterates Washington's long-standing call for Russian troops to comply with the terms of a ceasefire ending its five-day war with Georgia in August 2008 and withdraw from the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Speaking in his first interview with Georgian media since the war, Medvedev said the US Senate resolution reflected only the “views of some of its senile members”. “This is a foreign parliament and it is their own business,” Medvedev told Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio, Russia Today television and Georgia's PIK-TV at his seaside residence in Russia's southern city of Sochi. “I don't care about their rhetoric,” he said. The comments were a rare barb at Washington from Medvedev, who has worked closely with US President Barack Obama's team to oversee a much-touted “reset” in relations between their two countries following a low ebb over the Georgia war. Medvedev said that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili made the decision to stage a military assault to retake its rebel South Ossetia region, sparking the war with Russia, after then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Tbilisi in a show of US support. “After the visit by Condoleezza Rice, my (Georgian) colleague stopped communicating with me,” he said in the interview, released by the Kremlin on Friday. “I am perfectly sure that was when he came up with this plan (to go to war).” A string of diplomatic spats including spying accusations and Georgia's threat to veto Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization have increased tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi on the eve of the third anniversary of the war. Earlier this week, Russia's foreign ministry said the US Senate resolution fuelled a “revanchist mood” in Tbilisi. Moscow argues it now has a right to keep troops in two Georgian rebel regions after it recognized them as independent following the war.
