Miliband ratchets up the rhetoric against Russia

There is a risk that David Miliband could be talking us into a small war as he ratchets up the rhetoric against Russia on his visit to Ukraine. He has called for the "widest possible coalition against Russian aggression". This means full Western support if Russia pulls on Ukraine the same trick it has on Georgia - a grab for territory to protect the endangered Russian minority.

The language and mood of the Western allies in Nato and the EU is shifting from containment of Russia to confrontation. The main powers - Germany, France, Britain and the US - are pulling their junior partners together in a way they weren't only last week. France, as the current president of the EU, has called a summit next Monday.

The growing sense of confrontation, and possible collision, has not in any way been discouraged by the Russian regime -

quite the opposite. Both Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev have been breathing defiance. "We are not afraid of anything," President Medvedev told journalists summoned to his summer retreat yesterday, "including the prospect of a new Cold War."

He said Russia had been forced to act in Georgia to protect its own. If it means cutting ties with Nato and the World Trade Organisation, Prime Minister Putin has declared, so be it. In fact, Britain is already counselling abolishing the Nato-Russia Council, as Russia has done nothing through it to make Europe and the world any safer.

Foreign Secretary Miliband's specific charge that Russia's recognition of the independence of the two Georgian enclaves is "unjustifiable and unacceptable" is absolutely right. "It takes no account of the views of the hundreds of thousands of Georgians and others who have been forced to abandon their homes in the two territories.

This is in direct violation - in letter and spirit - of the Helsinki Final Act (1975), the founding document of the Organisation for Security