Russia accuses Georgia of 'new hostilities'

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-07 10:39

Russia accused the Georgian government on Monday of “seeking to provoke new hostilities” even as Russian peacekeepers were dismantling key checkpoints outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Authorities in Abkhazia said that an Abkhaz border guard was killed Monday in an exchange of fire with gunmen on the Georgian side. On Friday, a car bomb in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, killed eight Russian soldiers and three Ossetian civilians.

Russia has said Georgia is responsible for these attacks and three others in the disputed territories in recent days. Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, made a formal appeal to his French counterpart, Bernard Koucher, on Monday, asking the European Union to “take necessary measures to stabilize the situation in keeping with its commitments.”

A peace deal brokered by President Sarkozy of France had set this Friday as the deadline for Russian troops to withdraw from the buffer zones outside the enclaves.

Shota Utiashvili, a senior official at Georgia's Interior Ministry, denied any Georgian involvement in the attacks, saying that Georgia opposed any delay in the withdrawal.

In Karaleti, a village two miles north of Gori, ethnic Georgians passed freely through a Russian checkpoint where soldiers were busy winding up barbed wire, washing their clothes and packing their possessions.

A local farmer, Vitaly Shavshishvili, 34, had heard the Russians were leaving, but he wanted to see for himself. Though Karaleti has been peaceful, he said, his neighbors were afraid to leave their homes after dark, and he prayed for the return of the Georgian police.

In the aftermath of the August war between the countries, he said, his harvest of fruits and vegetables had rotted on the vine, costing him much, which he had hoped would last him a whole year. “Now we have hope only in God,” he said. “We have nothing to survive.”