Russia promises to start Georgia pullback

Russia has said it will complete a pullback of troops in Georgia by the end of Friday but it has stopped short of the extensive withdrawal demanded by the West.

Western states have grown increasingly impatient that Russian troops remain inside Georgia nearly a week after a ceasefire ended a war that broke out when Tbilisi tried to retake its breakaway South Ossetia region.

In some of its toughest comments to date, the White House accused Russia of breaking a promise to leave Georgia.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: "The withdrawal is not happening very quickly, if it in fact has begun.

"The withdrawal needs to take place, and needs to take place now."

Russian defence officials said what they called reinforcement troops would be pulled back to within South Ossetia by the end of Friday, and from there withdrawn to Russian soil within 10 days.

But they made a distinction between those troops and what they described as a peacekeeping force.

This force would stay on indefinitely in South Ossetia, and a "security zone" around it, the officials said.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said he would not stand for that.

He said: "There will be no buffer zones. We will never live with any buffer zones. We'll never allow anything like this."

Washington was to underline its support for aspiring NATO member Georgia on Friday by sending the US navy destroyer USS McFall into the Black Sea, the backyard of the Russian navy, to deliver relief supplies to Georgia.

NATO this week suspended contacts with Russia in protest at the conflict, and Russia hit back by freezing some military cooperation with the alliance.

Russian forces were rushed into Georgia on August 8 to repel an attack by Georgian forces on South Ossetia, a province that broke from Tbilisi in the early 1990s and is backed by Moscow.

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