On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered quite a virulent speech against Georgia and its chief, accusing them of performing state terrorism, while employing tactics that remind everyone of the political police of Stalin, following the arrest of four Russian intelligence officers by Georgian authorities last week on espionage charges, an act which triggered an acid diplomatic row between the two states that had been involved in political conflicts before.

During a meeting of the Russian Security Council in Moscow on Sunday, Putin labeled the arrests as "an act of state terrorism involving hostage-taking", as reported on the presidential website. In addition to this, in Putin's opinion, the Georgian President and his entourage are like "the successors of Lavrenti Beria", an obvious reference to the leader of Stalin's secret police, which arrested and executed thousands of Russian citizens based on false allegations that they had spied for foreign states, against the Soviet republic.

He also added that the reason why the Georgian leadership acted in such a vicious way, yet in a carefree fashion, was because of the country's alleged "foreign sponsors", referring to the United States, which had been providing military equipment and training for the Georgian army department since 2002, as part of the fight-against-terrorism war campaign.

Many view the current set of political statements of the Russian chief of state as a worsening of diplomatic relations between the two states, which had already been affected by Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili's drive towards bringing the country into NATO and the European Union, and thus, further away from the former Soviet state, to which one may add the series of diplomatic verbal battles over the withdrawal of Russian peacekeeping troops from two Georgian breakaway provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in July.

Moreover, late August found Georgia accusing South Ossetia pro-Russian deemed rebels, of launching a missile against a diplomatic helicopter that carried Georgian President Saakashvili and US senator John McCain, who had performed an official visit to Georgia in order to bring peace between the two heads of state.