MOSCOW. April 2 (Interfax) - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says the "U.S.' attempts to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia and include it into NATO" are dangerous geopolitical games.

(Zbigniew Brzezinski's call) "has become a generally accepted call among U.S. politicians: the call to drive Ukraine as far as possible from Russia allegedly in favor of democracy," Gorbachev writes in an article entitled Cold War Inertia. The article will run in Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Thursday.

"Yet where is democracy in this case, when Ukraine is being literally dragged into NATO despite the fact that most Ukrainians oppose it," he says.

"Such dangerous geopolitical games have nothing to do either with responsible politics or with real processes of globalization in the world," he says.

Frantic activity could be seen in the past weeks in international affairs, he wrote. "President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown discussed the idea of reforming international organizations at the French-British summit. Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George Bush probably do not want to leave an uncertain legacy on important security issues to their successors. The European Union and NATO will have to make serious decisions," Gorbachev writes.

"I want to hope that something will change in this world dangerously overloaded with problems," he wrote.

Practically everybody recognizes that the modern world, which is becoming more and more chaotic, needs a meaningful regulation of the processes underway in it, he writes.

"Yet who will do it and how? Those who have undertaken this task have demonstrated in Iraq where attempts to solve international problems by force can lead. The G8, which has no international legitimacy, is only partially good to regulate common issues. And the 'League of Democracy' proposed by some candidates for the U.S. presidency is an absurdity," he says.

"The awkward and inappropriate nature of such an organization (which is being proposed as a replacement to the United Nations) was made explicit in the recent speech made by John McCain, in which he proposed to leave China and Russia out of it," he wrote.

"The viciousness and dangerous character of this idea is that they propose to a world that recently shed the yoke of global confrontation to draw again a gigantic dividing line between the pleasant and unpleasant.

"They intend to include this country in the list of outcasts. This country which did more to end the cold war than others is accused of revanchism, nuclear and energy blackmail, of intending to subjugate its neighbors," Gorbachev wrote.

"A picture that is very far from the reality of relations between Russia and other countries, including its neighbors, is foisted (on the world's public opinion)," he wrote.