Gangster Government

Russian commanders said Wednesday that they were growing alarmed at the number of NATO warships sailing into the Black Sea, saying that NATO vessels now outnumbered the ships in their fleet anchored off the western coast of Georgia.

As attention turned to the balance of naval power in the sea, the leader of the separatist region of Abkhazia said he would invite Russia to establish a naval base at Sukhumi, a deep-water port in the territory.

But in a move certain to anger Russia, Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, said he would open negotiations with Moscow on raising the rent on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, which is in Crimea, a predominantly Russian province of Ukraine.

The United States was pursuing a delicate policy of delivering humanitarian aid on military transport planes and ships, apparently to illustrate to the Russians that they do not fully control Georgia’s airspace or coastline.

The policy has left American and Russian naval vessels maneuvering in close proximity off the western coast of Georgia, with the Americans concentrated near the southern port of Batumi and the Russians around the central port of Poti. It has also left the Kremlin deeply suspicious of American motives.

“What the Americans call humanitarian cargoes — of course, they are bringing in weapons,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia told the BBC in an interview on Tuesday, adding, “We’re not trying to prevent it.”

The White House dismissed all assertions that the Pentagon was shipping weapons under the “guise” of humanitarian aid, as the state-controlled news media put it, calling them “ridiculous.”

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