Georgia peace threatened by troop advances

The Georgia peace deal was faltering today in the face of Russian military dominance.

The EU deal involves both sides retreating to their original positions before fighting began last Friday. But today Georgia reported Russian tanks moving into its key central city of Gori outside the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

It also lost its last stronghold in another separatist province, Abkhazia.

Georgian troops had completely pulled out of a small section of Abkhazia which they controlled leaving the entire area in the hands of the Russian-backed separatists.

Abkhazia is now effectively out of Georgian hands and it will take more than an EU peace plan to get it back in.

In central Georgia, about 50 Russian tanks entered Gori today.

The city of 50,000 sits on Georgia’s only significant east-west road and is 15 miles south of South Ossetia.

Russia has handed out passports to most in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and stationed peacekeepers in the both regions since the early 1990s. Georgia wants the Russian peacekeepers out, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted they will stay.

Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili said Russia’s aim all along was not to gain control of two disputed provinces but to “destroy” the smaller nation, a former Soviet state.

Mr Saakashvili said: “They just don’t want freedom, and that’s why they want to stamp on Georgia and destroy it,” he declared.

Russia accused Georgia of killing more than 2,000 people, mostly civilians, in South Ossetia.

Meanwhile the first relief flight from the UN’s refugee agency arrived in Georgia as the number of people uprooted by the conflict neared 100,000.

Tens of thousands have fled the fighting – South Ossetians north to Russia, and Georgians east toward the capital of Tbilisi and west to the country’s Black Sea coast.

The Russia-Georgia dispute also reached the international courts, with the Georgian security council saying it had sued for ethnic cleansing. Medvedev reiterated accusations against Georgia of genocide.