On Saturday afternoon, several thousand protesters waving Georgian flags approached the Russian position on the outskirts of the strategic city of Gori. Some soldiers came out of their trenches, but there was no immediate sign of unrest.
The Russian pullback allowed Gori residents to begin returning two weeks after they fled Russian air attacks and advancing troops. Chaotic crowds of people and cars were jammed outside the city as Georgian police tried to control the mass return by setting up makeshift checkpoints
- an ironic echo of the Russian checkpoints that had ringed the city a day earlier.
Those who were let through came back to find a city battered by bombs, suffering from food shortages and gripped by anguish.
Surman Kekashvili, 37, stayed in Gori, taking shelter in a basement after his apartment was destroyed by a Russian bomb. Several days ago, he tried to give a decent burial to three relatives killed by the bomb, placing what body parts he could find in a shallow grave covered by a burnt log, a rock and a piece of scrap metal.
"I took only a foot and some of a torso. I could not get the other bodies out," he said.
His next-door neighbor, Frosia Dzadiashvili, had only enough of her apartment left to stay in a room the size of a broom closet. "I have nothing. My neighbors feed me if they have food to share," the 70-year-old woman said.
The Russian tanks and troops are now gone from Gori - but some troops are just several miles up the road at a new checkpoint on the edge of the Russian-proclaimed security zone around the border of South Ossetia, the separatist Georgian province that was the flashpoint of this month's war.
The United States, France and Britain protested that Russia's claims of these zones
- another is in the vicinity of Abkhazia, a Russian-backed separatist region
- does not comply with the European Union-brokered cease-fire.
The Russians "have without a doubt failed to live up to their obligations," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in Washington. "Establishing checkpoints, buffer zones, are definitely not part of the agreement."
Georgia's state minister on reintegration, Temur Yakobashvili, told the AP formation of a buffer zone outside South Ossetia "is absolutely illegal."
Russia claims it is allowed to be in these zones under peacekeeping agreements that ended fighting in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 1990s. But although Poti, the Black Sea port, is just outside the buffer zone for the Abkhazia conflict, Nogovitsyn said Russian troops who have set up positions on the outskirts won't leave and will patrol the city.
"Poti is not in the security zone. But that doesn't mean that we will sit behind the fence watch as they drive around in Hummers," Nogovitsyn said, making acid reference to four U.S. Humvees that the Russians seized in Poti this week. The vehicles were awaiting shipment back to the United States after being used in exercises in Georgia.
Russian forces also set up a checkpoint near Senaki, the home of a major Georgian military base. Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said Russian soldiers had severely looted the base, taking away military equipment and even television sets and air conditioners.
By keeping troops in Georgia proper - rather than returning them to Russia or to the two separatist republics where Russian forces had peacekeepers for more than a decade
- Moscow clearly hopes to intimidate its small, pro-Western neighbor.
