BATUMI, Georgia — President Putin of Russia stoked the fires of a worsening crisis in the south Caucasus yesterday by calling the Georgian government a terrorist administration.

In his first reaction to Georgia’s seizure of four Russian officers on spying charges — the ostensible trigger for the confrontation between the former Soviet neighbors — Mr. Putin appeared determined to goad rather than to reconcile.

He compared Georgia’s behavior to that of Joseph Stalin’s infamous spy chief, Lavrentiy Beria.

A Kremlin statement said: “The president described the actions of the Georgian leadership as an act of state terrorism with the taking of hostages.”

But Mr. Putin offered one concession when he reversed Saturday’s decision to suspend the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia by 2008.

Relations have been poor since Georgia’s pro-western president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was swept to power amid street protests in 2003. The atmosphere grew more poisoned over the summer as recriminations mounted over the status of two pro-Moscow breakaway regions in Georgia and Mr. Saakashvili’s ambitions to join NATO.

The Georgian government last week accused four Russians of “spying all over Georgian territory.”

Mr. Saakashvili, on a visit yesterday to the Black Sea port of Batumi, where there is a Russian base, said Georgia did not fear Moscow’s might.

Rejecting Russian threat that its forces in the country and in the Black Sea were”at heightened military readiness,”he said he would work to build “a stable country that continues to live, develop, and assert itself in the modern world.”

Few commentators believe that either side wants to go to war. But many fear that their dangerous brinkmanship could make conflict hard to avoid.

Georgia had the fastest growing military budget in the world in 2005. Though its forces remain greatly outnumbered by the Russians, Mr. Saakashvili could be tempted to contemplate limited engagement on his own soil.

Fearing encirclement, Russia vehemently opposes the idea of former Soviet states joining NATO — a course both Georgia and Ukraine have pursued in recent years.

If there is to be war — something most observers still consider to be less rather than more likely — it probably would be fought out in south Ossetia or Abkhazia. These regions have large Russian-speaking populations and declared de facto independence from Georgia in the 1990s.

Both are home to several thousand Russian peacekeepers officially there to monitor cease-fire agreements that ended the secessionist wars between 1992 and 1994.

Russian nationalists have long championed the breakaway regions’ cause, and the Kremlin has fretted over Mr. Saakashvili’s dreams to reunite Georgia.

A successful Georgian operation to dislodge a renegade warlord in the Kodori Gorge over the summer appears to have convinced some in the Kremlin that Mr. Saakashvili is trying to make his dreams reality, which may go some way to explaining Russia’s reaction.