Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that Georgia's leadership was behaving towards Russian servicemen like Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's secret police chief.
Mr Putin, referring to Georgia's arrest of four Russian army officers on spying charges, called it "a sign of the political legacy of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria", Interfax news agency reported.
Beria, an ethnic Georgian like Stalin, was in charge of the feared NKVD secret police which ruthlessly purged millions of Soviet citizens.
