MOSCOW, August 19 (RIA Novosti) - NATO foreign ministers are to discuss the military alliance's response to the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia at an emergency session in Brussels on Tuesday.

The meeting was called last week by Washington, which has accused Russia of a "disproportionate" response to Georgia's attack on breakaway South Ossetia on August 8.

During its subsequent counter operation to expel Georgian troops from the de facto independent republic and to reinforce Russian peacekeepers, Moscow sent some 10,000 troops and several hundred armored vehicles into the area.

Speaking on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that "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."

Russian troops are widely reported to remain in parts of Georgia, including the town of Gori, despite a pledge by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that they would begin pulling out from the South Caucasus state on Monday.

"It didn't take that long for the Russian forces to get in and it really shouldn't take that long for them to get out," Rice said.

"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," Rice also said, referring to Georgia and Ukraine.

In April, at the organization's summit in Bucharest, both former Soviet republics were denied a NATO Membership Action Plan that would have put them on the road to membership of the military alliance. NATO has however pledged to review the decision in December, and has also stated that both countries will in the future be accepted into the 26-nation alliance.

Both Tbilisi and Kiev had received strong U.S. backing for their bids. However, Washington's enthusiasm for accepting Russia's neighbors into the alliance was tempered by concern from Germany and France that doing so would unnecessarily antagonize Moscow.

Poland and Lithuania, both members of NATO, called on Tuesday for the military alliance to speed up its acceptance of Georgia and Ukraine into the organization in the interests of "regional security."

Rice also called Russia's recent policies, including a return to Cold-War era patrols by strategic bombers off the coast of Alaska, "a very dangerous game and perhaps one the Russians want to reconsider."

Washington's position that NATO must undertake a complete review of ties with Russia is expected to be backed by the majority of former Communist bloc NATO members, while Germany and France, again wary of harming relations with Moscow, are likely to take a softer approach.

A NATO spokeswoman said however that ministers would deliver "a very clear message of solidarity to Georgia," at the meeting.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had also earlier described the Russian response to the attack on South Ossetia as "excessive."

Responding to the secretary general's criticism, Russian NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin told the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that, "These are not credible allegations, especially coming from the head of an organization like NATO, which has itself used not just disproportionate force, but force against civilian targets and the civilian population, especially in its conflict with Yugoslavia in 1999."

Rogozin has also warned that cooperation between Russia and NATO will suffer if the organization fails to reach a "reasonable decision" at its meeting on Tuesday.

"We don't want to hear that Saakashvili is a saint," he warned.

Moscow has said that some 1,600 people died during the Georgian offensive on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia.

Russia withdrew on Monday its request for an emergency session of the Russia-NATO Council to address the situation in Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia, blaming Washington's "unconstructive" approach.