(WARSAW) - Russia will lose if it seeks confrontation with the West, Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview published Wednesday.

"I would prefer to see Russia cooperate and integrate with the broadly defined West, but if it seeks confrontation, it will lose again," Sikorski told Poland's Dziennik daily.

"As Europe, we are ten times richer than Russia, and along with the United States, twenty times" he said.

Sikorski said he was confident the European Union, holding an extraordinary summit next Monday on the Georgia crisis, and the West "will find instruments to cooperate with Russia on more realistic principles as well as ways to express our displeasure."

"A new Cold War would be particularly uncomfortable for Poland, so we should try to avoid it," he added.

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, a firm ally of Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili, has slammed Russia's controversial decision Tuesday to recognise the independence of breakaway Georgian territories South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The Polish foreign ministry reacted to the news by urging EU leaders to "unequivocally support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia." mrm/mas/ss

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