On her way to an emergency NATO foreign ministers meeting on the crisis, Rice said the alliance would punish Russia for its invasion of the Georgia and deny its ambitions by rebuilding and fully backing Georgia and other Eastern European democracies.

'We have to deny Russian strategic objectives, which are clearly to undermine Georgia's democracy, to use its military capability to damage and in some cases destroy Georgian infrastructure and to try and weaken the Georgian state,' she said.

'We are determined to deny them their strategic objective,' Rice told reporters aboard her plane, adding that any attempt to recreate the Cold War by drawing a 'new line' through Europe and intimidating former Soviet republics and ex-satellite states into submission would fail.

'We are not going to allow Russia to draw a new line at those states that are not yet integrated into the trans-Atlantic structures,' she said, referring to Georgia and Ukraine, which have not yet joined NATO or the European Union but would like to.

Rice could not say what NATO would eventually decide to do to make its position clear but said the alliance would speak with one voice 'to clearly indicate that we are not accepting a new line.'....