Russian troops to pull out, amid EU sanctions threat

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Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has ordered troops to pull out of Georgia starting from noon local time on Monday (18 August), following calls by French and German EU leaders over the weekend.

French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, secured the promised withdrawal in a telephone call to Moscow on Sunday, in which he threatened “serious consequences” unless Russia retreats to positions held before fighting broke out on 7 August.

“If this ceasefire clause [on pre-7 August positions] is not applied quickly and in its entirety, I will convoke an extraordinary council of the European Union to decide what consequences to draw,” he explained later in a statement in French daily Le Figaro.

“I expect a very fast, very prompt withdrawal of Russian troops out of Georgia,” German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said at a press conference in Tbilisi on Sunday. “Georgia will become a member of NATO if it wants to – and it does want to,” she added, AP reports.

On Monday morning, Russian troops remained dug-in just 35 kilometres from the Georgian capital, as well as holding the Georgian Black Sea ports of Poti and Senaki while roaming freely up and down the country’s main roads.

Troops also deployed SS-21 earth-to-earth missiles in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, the New York Times says, with the rockets capable of striking Tbilisi.

Russian soldiers and Russian-backed South Ossetian paramilitaries have spent the past few days destroying Georgian military bases and infrastructure, as well as looting homes and roughing up ethnic Georgian civilians.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that Georgia can “forget” about its territorial integrity, indicating that troops might stay in South Ossetia and a second pro-Russian, rebel province – Abkhazia – for the long term.

The UN refugee centre estimates the conflict has displaced 98,000 people in Georgia proper and a further 60,000 people in South Ossetia. Hundreds of civilians are also thought to have died.

“We will have to determine if the Russian intervention against its Georgian neighbour was a brutal and excessive response,” Mr Sarkozy wrote in Le Figaro. “In which case…there will be inevitable consequences for its relations with the European Union.”

EU’s eastern front

EU foreign ministers meeting last week put off until 5 September a debate on whether to impose diplomatic sanctions, such as suspending talks on a new EU-Russia strategic treaty or a future visa-free travel deal.

Former communist EU states, backed by the UK and Sweden, want a strong line on Russia, worrying that the Georgia incursion could be the start of a wider campaign to undermine pro-western countries in Russia’s old sphere of influence.

A flash poll by the Pentor institute in Poland said that 49.8 percent of Polish people are scared of a potential Russian military attack in the next few years.

Ukraine president, Viktor Yushchenko, has also offered the west the use of Ukrainian radar facilities in the hope of obtaining security guarantees in return, with an EU-Ukraine summit tabled for 9 September.

The country’s Crimea peninsula has a large ethnic Russian population and well-organised separatist movements. Meanwhile, Russian generals dismissed as “nonsense” a recent Ukrainian law limiting the movements of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which is stationed in the region until 2017.

Sanctions unlikely

But Germany and Luxembourg have already spoken out against isolating Russia – one of the EU’s biggest energy suppliers – as a result of the Georgia war.

“I do not advise…any knee-jerk reaction such as suspending talks on a partnership and cooperation agreement [with the EU],” German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said in an interview with weekly Welt am Sonntag. “Our interest in this is as great as Russia itself. Talks in the NATO-Russian Council are essential too. Because we need open lines of communication.”

Speaking in Moscow on Friday, Ms Merkel also took a softer line than in Tbilisi, saying “Some of Russia’s actions were not proportionate…[but] it is rare that all the blame is on one side. In fact, both sides are probably to blame. ”

“We must stick to the partnership with Russia, even after these recent events which of course do not please us,” Luxembourg foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

“There will be no consequences of this conflict,” a diplomat from a former communist state told EUobserver. “It’s almost as if Germany and Russia had a meeting and said ‘this is our territory and this is yours, you can do what you like there’.”