TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia announced Tuesday that it had put down a brief military mutiny that aimed to disrupt NATO military exercises, ratcheting up tensions a day before the exercises are scheduled to begin over Russian objections.

According to the Georgian account, 25 miles from Tbilisi, the capital, government forces during the day surrounded a tank battalion whose leaders were planning the uprising. A few hours later, most of the unit’s 500 soldiers surrendered, and several of their commanders were detained.

President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russia was hoping to derail the NATO exercises, which he called a “symbolic event.”

“We are asking our northern neighbor to refrain from any provocations,” he said of Russia, in a televised interview.

Russia immediately denied any role in the unrest.

“This is not the first time we have been accused of interference without evidence,” a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. “We would like to reiterate that Russia, as a matter of principle, doesn’t interfere in Georgia’s domestic affairs.”

The exchange raised the already high temperature of regional relations in advance of the exercises, run by NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, which includes nonmembers of the alliance. NATO has described the plan as routine and small-scale — around 1,000 soldiers will take part in field exercises — but Russia complains that, less than a year after its war with Georgia, any NATO training there is provocative.

Armenia, Serbia and Kazakhstan have said they will pull out of the exercises in solidarity with Russia. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia notified NATO on Tuesday that it was pulling out of a long-anticipated NATO-Russia Council meeting scheduled for May 19 in Brussels, in protest of the exercises and of NATO’s expulsion of two Russian diplomats on suspicion of spying.

Carmen Romero, a NATO spokeswoman, said Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer regretted Russia’s decision and hoped to reschedule the meeting soon. She said the exercises would go on as scheduled.

Dmitri O. Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO, warned that the exercises might “significantly affect the stability of the entire South Caucasus.”

“How can one insist on these exercises with such stubbornness and persistence?” he said, in comments broadcast in Russia. “If these exercises were held at NATO’s insistence in some psychiatric hospital, it would be a much more adequate decision than holding them on the territory of the Georgian state.”

Details of the Georgian mutiny emerged throughout the day.

Shota Utiashvili, a top official in Georgia’s Interior Ministry, said authorities learned at 6:30 a.m. that a tank battalion stationed at Mukhrovani — five miles from the site of the planned military exercises — had publicly announced a mutiny. He said the unit’s 500 soldiers had sealed off the base and would not allow Defense Ministry officials to enter.

“What happened is that battalion commanders told the soldiers that the Russians were attacking them and they had to take combat positions,” Mr. Utiashvili said. Around noon, he said, the soldiers learned from news reports that their commanders had misled them and surrendered. Authorities were relieved to discover that the mutiny was small and isolated, he said.

In the morning, officials confidently asserted a Russian hand in the plan, but by afternoon they were more cautious. Mr. Utiashvili said it was “not exactly clear” whether the accused plotters had Russian support.

“To have a legally sound case we need more information,” he said. “This morning we had some evidence, and from that evidence one would follow that Russia was involved.”

Incriminating surveillance footage was broadcast all day on Georgian television. In one video, which had been edited, Gia Ghvaladze, a former major in the Georgian special forces, is shown describing plans to overthrow Mr. Saakashvili’s government on behalf of Russia. Major Ghvaladze says the plan is to approach Tbilisi with a column of 250 troop carriers and backup from 5,000 Russian troops, and he talks about killing six of Mr. Saakashvili’s closest advisers.

He was arrested Monday night on charges of organizing a mutiny. By Tuesday evening, the police had arrested 13 suspects, according to the Interior Ministry.

The unfolding events left much of Tbilisi spellbound — or paralyzed. Traffic thinned out on the city’s streets, and when a professor named Natia Kuprashvili, 29, tried to teach her class at Tbilisi State University, her students’ cellphones began to ring so wildly that she gave up and went in search of a television.

But in the end, she said, “it is very hard to understand what really happened here.”

A Georgian named Roman Apakidze, 30, concluded that a mutiny had taken place, but that the government was distorting it for political purposes.

“I just don’t like the way the government is handling this information — it is real information terror against ordinary people, what they do,” he said. “It is better not to turn on the television at all.”

Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Ellen Barry from Moscow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world/europe/06georgia.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

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