MANAGUA -- Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega has formally recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, supporting Russia's stance on the breakaway Georgian regions and reviving ghosts of the Cold War.
Nicaragua gives "full recognition" to the "sister" republics as "new members of the community of independent nations of the world, whom we welcome," according to two decrees, the foreign ministry said Friday.
Ortega, a former Marxist guerilla who had close ties to the ex-Soviet Union, went further than other leftist Latin American governments in his defiance of Washington over the conflict by recognizing the rebel regions in a speech Tuesday.
Ortega also accused NATO of "building a military fence against Russia" in Tuesday's speech to celebrate 29 years of the army founded during the 1979-90 Sandinista revolution.
Friday's decrees reinforced his stance by instructing "the foreign ministry to take the necessary steps, under the law, to ... establish full diplomatic relations" with both republics.
"Since we began in government we said we would establish relations with the whole world," Nicaraguan acting foreign minister Manuel Coronel said Friday.
He said he would meet with Russia's ambassador to Nicaragua, Igor Kondrashev, on Friday to ask him "to act as a channel as we establish bilateral relations" with the breakaway regions.
Kondrashev thanked "the president of Nicaragua for his position in recognizing these two regions," according to the Nuevo Diario newspaper, after a meeting with the Congress' Commission of Foreign Affairs on Thursday.
Russian troops poured into Georgia last month to repel an attack by the Georgian army aimed at retaking South Ossetia. They have remained deep inside Georgian territory in what Moscow calls "security zones."
Ortega, Nicaragua's president 1985-1990, and again starting in 2007, took a more strident stance on the conflict than Venezuela and Cuba, which have both nonetheless sided with Russia.
Venezuela accused the United States of "planning, preparing and ordering" the conflict in Georgia.
"We support Russia, we're with Russia and with the worthy action of Russia," President Hugo Chavez said on August 29.
Cuba, which received economic aid for 30 years from Moscow, also closed ranks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and accused Georgia of complicity with the United States, in a declaration on August 11 signed by President Raul Castro.
Former Cuban president and revolutionary leader Fidel Castro warned Washington it was playing a threat of "nuclear war" and trying to reward Georgia for serving as "canon fodder" for Moscow.
Many observers wondered if Ortega had made a dangerous gamble.
Ortega's stance puts "Nicaragua's foreign policy in a position of great controversy from the point of view of the international community and the United Nations," Luis Guillermo Solis, a Costa Rican political analyst, told Agence France-Presse.
It was an "unwise" decision, Emilio Alvarez, former Nicaraguan foreign minister, told AFP, saying it evoked the "nostalgic attitudes of Mr Ortega."
Ortega "continues to align himself with countries from which Nicaragua has nothing to gain," said Leonel Teller, spokesman for the right-wing Liberal Constitutional Party, in a statement published in several newspapers Friday.
Since his return to power, Ortega has cultivated links with Iran and Libya as well as Venezuela and Cuba, defying Washington despite more than 500 million dollars of US contributions to Nicaragua in bilateral cooperation.
Nicaragua's exports to the United States, meanwhile, grew by 60 percent in the first semester of 2008 compared with the same period the previous year.
