Russian attack moves on to two fronts in Georgia

Russia invaded Georgia today sending forces beyond the two breakaway provinces it now controls.

As fighting continued outside South Ossetia, Russian armour created a second front, moving out of the western region of Abkhazia to capture a nearby town.

The two-front battlefield is a major escalation in the Russian-Georgian conflict that erupted on Friday after Georgia gambled on an offensive to regain control of South Ossetia.

The move, coming even after Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili signed a cease-fire pledge, appeared to show Russian determination to break the small, Western-backed country.

Russian armored personnel carriers rolled into Senaki, a town in Western Georgia about 20 miles inland from the Black Sea port of Poti, Georgia said.

Most Georgian troops are near South Ossetia, in the centre of the country along its northern border with Russia, making it difficult to repel an offensive from Abkhazia, in the west along the Black Sea.

Russian forces also moved into the town of Zugdidi where they seized police stations while Abkhazian forces took control of the nearby village of Kurga.

Meanwhile to the east there were reports that Russian and Georgian troops were fighting in the town of Gori, which lies between South Ossetia and the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

Mr Saakashvili accused Russia of planning to overthrow his government and win control of vital oil and gas piplelines to the West which route through the Caucasus.

Russia “wants to replace the government in Tbilisi”, he said. “It wasn’t for them about South Ossetia ... it’s about controlling energy.

International efforts continued to try to end the fighting.

The world’s leading industrial nations, the G7, urged Russia to accept an immediate cease-fire with Georgia.

They also called for it to agree to international mediation over a growing crisis that is verging on all-out war in the former Soviet republic’s separatist areas.

International envoys flew into the region yesterday and the UN Security Council met for the fourth time in as many days to try to end the conflict before it spreads.

President George Bush and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin traded insults. Mr Bush sharply criticized Moscow’s military crackdown on Georgia, saying the violence was unacceptable and Russia’s response was disproportionate.

Mr Putin criticized the United States for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq at Georgia’s request.

In Tbilisi Mr Saakashvili signed a cease-fire pledge proposed by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and his Finnish counterpart, Alexander Stubb. The EU envoys plan to travel to Moscow to try to persuade Russia to accept it.

Mr Saakashvili ordered the Georgian offensive to halt yesterday after overwhelming Russian firepower blasted his troops out of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

Georgia began the offensive aimed at regaining control over South Ossetia on Friday with heavy shelling and air strikes that ravaged the city of Tskhinvali.

It underestimated the Russian response which was swift and overpowering. Thousands of troops shelled the Georgians until they fled Tskhinvali and air attacks swept across Georgia, some on facilities far from the site of the fighting.

The Georgian president said Russian planes were bombing roads and bridges, destroying radar systems and targeting Tbilisi’s civilian airport. One Russian bombing raid struck the Tbilisi airport area only a half hour before the EU envoys arrived, he said.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said more than 1,600 people had been killed in South Ossetia since Friday, most of them Ossetians with Russian passports.

Thousands of civilians have fled South Ossetia – many seeking shelter in the neighboring Russian province of North Ossetia.

“The Georgians burned all of our homes,” said one elderly woman, as she sat on a bench under a tree with three other white-haired survivors of the fighting. “The Georgians say it is their land. Where is our land, then?”