Lawmakers had voted unanimously late Thursday to break off ties with Russia, branding it an "aggressor country" in their conflict over two Russian-backed separatist regions in Georgia.
Russia criticized the decision. "Breaking off diplomatic relations with Tbilisi is not Moscow's choice, and the responsibility lies with Tbilisi," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko as saying.
Russia will have to close its embassy in Georgia if ties are severed, the RIA-Novosti agency quoted an unnamed ministry official as saying. However, both nations' consulates will remain open
- important for the many Georgian citizens living in Russia.
Adding to the tension, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Moscow will not be isolated over its conduct in Georgia and warned Europe that it shouldn't cater to the U.S.
"If European countries want to serve the foreign policy interests of the United States, in my view they won't win anything from this," Putin said in an interview with Germany's ARD television before a European Union meeting in Brussels on Monday about the Georgia crisis and relations with Russia.
Putin also justified Russia's actions, saying it had defended the lives of its citizens during the war.
"Such a country will not be in isolation," he said in an excerpts shown on state-run Russian television.
A lawmaker in South Ossetia, meanwhile, said Russia intends to eventually absorb the breakaway province at the center of the war that broke out Aug. 7 when Georgia sent troops into South Ossetia to wrest back control from separatists, prompting Russia to send in hundreds of tanks and troops.
The five days of warfare ruined already frayed Georgia-Russia ties and caused the biggest crisis in Moscow's relations with the West since the 1991 Soviet collapse.
Russia described Tbilisi's military offensive as blind aggression, saying the move deprived Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili of the moral authority to defend his country's territorial integrity.
Georgia and the West in turn criticized Russia for pressing further into Georgia proper and for ignoring a cease-fire brokered by the European Union.
This week, Moscow announced that it will recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist Georgian region with strong ties to Russia, as independent states.
South Ossetian parliamentary speaker Znaur Gassiyev said Russia will absorb South Ossetia within "several years" or earlier. He said that position was "firmly stated" by both the province's leader, Eduard Kokoity, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in talks in Moscow earlier this week.
