Miliband slams Russian 'aggression'

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Mr Miliband said the actions were "simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century".

He was speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme ahead of an emergency meeting of European foreign ministers aimed at co-ordinating an international response to the crisis, and ensuring a lasting resolution following a fragile ceasefire brokered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr Miliband, who broke off his holiday in Spain to attend the meeting in Brussels, said that the international community needed to send a clear message to Moscow that its methods were unacceptable.

"The sight of Russian tanks rolling into parts of a sovereign country on its neighbouring borders will have brought a chill down the spine of many people, rightly," he said.

"That is a reversion to not just Cold War politics, it is nineteenth century way of doing politics.

"I think it is very, very important at a European level, but also at the UN, that we assert that that is simply not the way in which international relations can be run in the 21st century."

Mr Miliband said it was important that Russian troops which advanced into Georgia beyond the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia - where they already had peacekeepers stationed - now pulled back.

He said that the Russians had to accept that they no longer had the right to interfere in former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine.