• English Site
• > World
• > Georgia

Georgia Mission

Sarkozy Presses Medvedev on Troop Withdrawal

French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Moscow on Monday to try to persuade Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to finally withdraw his troops from Georgia. However, EU plans to send in monitors to replace Russian soldiers don't seem to be going down well in Moscow.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is making a last ditch effort to save the cease-fire deal he negotiated between Russia and Georgia almost a month ago, which put an end to a five-day war between the two states. In Moscow on Monday heading a European Union delegation, Sarkozy pressed his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, to honor his pledge to pull Russian troops out of Georgia. The EU group will also meet with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in Tbilisi later on Monday.

During the talks on Monday the top-level delegation, which included European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, was also pushing for the deployment of several hundred EU monitors in Georgia. However, this looked like a somewhat forlorn hope given that even before the visitors had sat down with Medvedev a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman seemed to rule out such a mission.

Speaking at the start of the talks Sarkozy, current holder of the rotating EU presidency, warned the Russian president that the EU nations were united in their stance. "The want peace, they want confidence, they want good neighborly relations," said Sarkozy. "And in the same way as our Russian friends, they want to defend our convictions. The European Union also has its principles and convictions."

It is nearly a month since Sarkozy negotiated a truce to end the war in the Caucasus that broke out after Russia launched a massive counter-attack to defend the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia following an invasion by Georgian troops on Aug. 7. Tbilisi had been attempting to regain control of the territory that had managed its own affairs since the early 1990s.

While Russia had agreed to pull back to the Aug. 6 positions as part of the six-point peace plan, it has instead maintained a military presence in Georgia proper. Its subsequent recognition of the independence of both South Ossetia and the other Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia has caused consternation in the West.

Russia says its troops are peacekeepers required to maintain security in a buffer zone around the two separatist provinces, and Sarkozy has been criticized for giving Moscow too much room for interpretation of the Aug. 12 peace deal. His diplomatic mission to both Moscow and Tbilisi on Monday is designed to salvage this original cease-fire deal by persuading Russia to once and for all pull back out of Georgian territory.

"I fully share the point of view of President Medvedev that the starting point is the agreement," Sarkozy said at the start of the talks. "It is precisely this agreement which should be carried out."

The EU is hoping that a quick deployment of several hundred EU monitors to Georgia would remove Russia's justification for the continued presence of its troops beyond the provinces' borders. However, just before Monday's meeting, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said that Moscow was opposed to EU monitors. "We believe it will lead to an unnecessary fragmentation of international monitoring efforts already being conducted today by the UN and the OSCE," he told reporters, adding that Russia welcomed plans to increase the number of the Organization for Security and Cooperation's monitors in Georgia.

smd -- with wire reports