Word: tbilisi
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...they will remove the bulk of the troops that have occupied Georgia by the end of Friday. But there is still little evidence that the promised pull-out will be completed on or near schedule Friday morning. Russian soldiers controlled a major checkpoint just 35 km (21.7 miles) from Tbilisi on the road to Gori, checking papers, searching cars and preventing some foreigners, including many journalists, from traveling further. The withdrawal "is taking place but very slowly," says Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb, the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a security network to which every...
...Moscow's forces in Georgia has started to create a new reality on the ground. One objective of the Russian occupation until now has been to "confuse the enemy" as to their real intentions in the country, says David Smith, director of the Georgian Security Analysis Center in Tbilisi. That is certainly the effect of the combined talk of withdrawal and the stationary though not inactive presence of the occupying troops. The Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili estimated that Russian soldiers are nominally in control of 30% of Georgian territory. The troops have used the past week, since a de facto...
...eastern and western Georgia, columns of Russian artillery and troop trucks could be seen rumbling first towards the capital, then in the opposite direction, then off the road into the surrounding countryside. Reports of their withdrawal or advance based on such movements are picked up by government spokesmen in Tbilisi and broadcast around the world...
...Georgians are increasinly bewildered. Dali Sachaleli, 42, was visiting her ailing mother in the area from her home in Tbilisi and said that all night she listened to Russian armor and tanks clank about the fields and homes around her family home. "People say they are leaving [mines] behind for when they leave," she told me on the road nearby. "We don't know what they are doing." She and other villagers used to picnic by a lake on top of the hill, but have stopped going because of fears of mines. (There are no confirmed reports of mining...
...some kind of collaboration with the power on the ground is not preferable to war. In Gori, now largely abandoned after the Russian bombings, farmer Giorgi Chikladze says he hopes he can now sell his peaches to Russia , where he says he would get higher prices than in Tbilisi. In the old days when Georgia was still under Soviet rule, he says, his family sold its harvest of apples and peaches to Russian markets. But since the border was closed to trade following Georgian President Saakashvillis' souring relations with Moscow, that's no longer possible. He can sell his fruit...