Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili admitted Tuesday that he had troops stationed in separatist South Ossetia and not only vowed to keep them there despite Russian protests but also threatened to rip up a key peace accord.
"We have no plans to withdraw our troops" from the region, Saakashvili said in a nationally televised address.
With tensions between Tbilisi and Moscow soaring for weeks now, he said he was ready to "denounce" a 12-year-old peacekeeping arrangement if Georgian troops were not allowed to be stationed in the region.
Saakashvili assumed power in January after toppling the decade-old regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in a peaceful revolution with a vow to reunify his fractured and impoverished ex-Soviet state.
He has already won control over the pro-Moscow Black Sea enclave of Adjara and has now set his sights on South Ossetia - a republic where most people now have Russian passports but which also has a scattering of ethnic Georgian villages.
The two fought a civil war as the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s. Tbilisi lost the conflict after South Ossetia received military assistance from Russia and declared independence.
Peacekeepers from the three sides patrol a zone on Georgia's border with South Ossetia under an agreement signed in 1992.
But all three now admit that the agreement is being broken. Russian mercenaries are protecting ethnic Russian villages in the region and now Saakashvili said his troops are doing the same with ethnic Georgian ones.
The self declared president of South Ossetia, Eduard Kokoity responded angrily that Saakashvili was threatening to "resolve the Georgia and South Ossetia by the use of force."
A Moscow foreign ministry statement said in more diplomatic tones that Georgia "has the right" to pull out of the 1992 deal but that such a decision "threatened to renew the conflict."
Saakashvili also accused Russia on Tuesday of being responsible for the temporary arrest of 40 Georgian police officers in the region earlier this month and of sending spies into South Ossetia.
In one of his sternest comments directed at Moscow to date, Saakashvili said that "friendship and co-operation (between Georgia and Russia) reaches an end when we speak about Georgia's territorial integrity."
The Russian foreign ministry has issued condemnations of Georgia's actions in South Ossetia on an almost daily basis in recent weeks.
Another Moscow official was forced to deny Georgian charges that Russia was putting tanks and armoured vehicles into the zone.
Saakashvili paid a snap visit to South Ossetia late Sunday, prompting an angry statement from the Russian foreign ministry the following day.
Georgia broke away from the Soviet Union to become a separate independent country after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but has tense relations with Russia, which accuses it of harbouring fighters from separatist Chechnya.
Saakashvili is tentatively scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this fall in a bid to resolve the conflict.