Russian soldiers vacate buffer zones in Georgia
Ossetian soldiers and Russian peacekeepers were positioned about 200 yards to the north, and the Georgian police officers examined them through binoculars, commenting to one another on the weapons their counterparts were carrying.
The soldiers peered back nervously, watching as the Georgians built their new checkpoint. At one point, when they saw a sudden movement from across the line, they all jumped.
Russia removed its last checkpoints from the buffer zones outside the breakaway enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on Wednesday, fulfilling a central requirement of a French-brokered cease-fire agreement two days before an Oct. 10 deadline. No violence was reported on either side. But it was clear, from watching Georgian forces dig into their new positions in Ergneti, that the tensions were undiminished.
A mutual stare-down at close range was "how the war started," said Shota Utiashvili, a senior official in Georgia's Interior Ministry.
The Georgian authorities still want Russian forces to withdraw from Akhalgori, a district in South Ossetia, and from the Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia — areas administered by Georgia before the August war. They are also calling for ethnic Georgian refugees to be allowed to return to their homes in the disputed territories, and for European monitors to patrol inside the enclaves, not just in Georgian territory, Utiashvili said.
The war began Aug. 7, when Georgia attacked Russian-backed separatists in South Ossetia. Russia responded by sending troops deep into Georgian territory, setting off the worst confrontation between Russia and the United States since the Cold War.
In a speech on Monday to the World Policy Conference in Evian, France, the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, called for a new global security framework that would challenge the United States' "determination to enforce its global dominance."
He warned that American policy — in particular the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders and a planned missile defense system — was reviving the global divisions of the Cold War. Russia, he said, is "absolutely not interested in confrontation."
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