Russia to keep control of port city in Georgia

Thousands of Georgians angry at the presence of Russian troops on the outskirts of the strategic Black Sea port of Poti took to the streets in protest today.

The demonstration came as a top Russian general in Moscow said his country’s forces would continue to patrol Poti even though it lies outside the so-called “security zones” where Russia claims it has the right to station troops in Georgia.

The comments by deputy head of the general staff Col Gen Anatoly Nogovitsyn, reported by Russian news agencies, showed that despite protests from the US, France and Britain, Russia was confident enough to occupy whatever part of Georgia it deemed necessary.

Russian troops held positions in trenches they had dug near a bridge that provides the only access to Poti. Tanks and APCs were parked nearby. Russian troops hoisted both Russian flags and the flag of the Commonweath of Independent States, or CIS, the union of former Soviet republics that Georgia recently announced it had left.

The Poti protest was mirrored in other areas of Georgia where a Russian presence remained.

The statement by Nogovitsyn came a day after Russia said it had pulled back forces from Georgia in accordance with a EU-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Russia interprets the accord as allowing it to keep a substantial military presence in Georgia – a point hotly disputed by Western nations – because of earlier peacekeeping agreements that ended fighting in the separatist areas of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 1990s.

But even though Poti is completely outside the buffer zone for Abkhazia, Nogovitsyn said Russian troops are not leaving and will patrol the city.

Russian forces also set up a checkpoint near Senaki, the home of a major military base in western Georgia that Georgian troops retook today.

Large areas of the base remained inaccessible as Georgian troops began searching for explosives that may have been left behind.

In South Ossetia, Russian troops erected 18 peacekeeping posts in the “security zone” and planned to build another 18 peacekeeping posts around Abkhazia. A total of 2,600 heavily armed troops the Russians call peacekeepers will be deployed in those regions.

In a separate development, a series of explosions rang out over the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali.

It remained unclear if arms were being deliberately destroyed. No casualties were reported.

Yesterday’s pullback came two weeks to the day after thousands of Russian soldiers roared into the former Soviet republic following an assault by Georgian forces on separatist South Ossetia. The fighting left hundreds dead and nearly 160,000 people homeless.

It also has deeply strained relations between Moscow and the West. Russia has frozen its military co-operation with Nato, Moscow’s Cold War foe, underscoring a growing division in Europe.

Crowds of Georgians and lines of cars headed into the central city of Gori today in a mass return so chaotic that Georgian police set up makeshift checkpoints to control the flow of people. Residents found a city battered by bombs, suffering from food shortages and gripped by anguish.

The Russian tanks and troops are now gone from Gori – but other Russian troops are just a few miles up the road at a new Russian checkpoint.