“The crisis has spilled beyond a local conflict and today has become a potential source of instability in other regions, including the Commonwealth of Independent States,” Putin said.

“The war against Iraq is fraught with unpredictable consequences, including increased extremism,” Putin told a gathering of top security officials from the CIS, a loose grouping of former Soviet republics.

Putin, who on Thursday called on the US to stop the war, saying that attack was a “serious political mistake,” stepped up his warnings of the risk to global security.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told the lower house of parliament that a foreign occupation of Iraq without UN Security Council permission would be illegitimate.

In the first concrete act of protest by a leading anti-war nation, Ivanov said that Russia and other countries would ask the global body to determine if the US attack violated international law.

“With other states, we will put this question before the UN’s legal department. It is very important that these arguments (about the legality of US actions) are confirmed,” he told the State Duma.

“If the UN Security Council describes the US actions as an aggression, appropriate measures will be taken,” the foreign minister said. “The action has no legal basis and the attempts to justify it by resolution 1441 are not serious,” he concluded.

The US administration argues that resolution 1441, passed unanimously in November, which threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” if it failed to show it had handed over its weapons of mass destruction, provides sufficient authority for the war.

He also alleged that the US-led coalition for the immediate disarmament of Iraq was “an amorphous thing, which Washington and London are trying to present as a coalition to show they’re not alone.”

“This coalition is a made-up thing, which in reality only consists of the United States and Britain,” Ivanov said.

In spite of his harsh words, Ivanov told lawmakers that the war must not be allowed to derail the anti-terrorist coalition cobbled together after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States.

After Ivanov’s address, the State Duma passed a resolution calling on Putin to urge the Security Council to send UN peacekeeping forces to Iraq to separate the warring sides and to convene a special session of the UN General Assembly to condemn US-British aggression.

The resolution also called for boosting Russia’s defense budget to the equivalent of 3.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — the long-pledged target, which the cash-strapped government has never achieved.

Ivanov waved away reports that the United States had asked foreign capitals to deport Iraqi diplomats, and said Washington had not approached Moscow on the matter. “If we receive such a request, it would carry no legal force and we would react accordingly,” he told reporters at the Duma.

The US Embassy in Moscow confirmed that Washington had asked foreign countries to temporarily suspend Iraqi diplomatic missions and to ensure that high-ranking Iraqi representatives leave.

As for requests to freeze Iraqi assets, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Moscow had no evidence suggesting that Saddam was laundering funds through Russian accounts.