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Russia rejects UN Georgia draft

Politics Materials 20 August 2008 11:00 (UTC +04:00)
Russia rejects UN Georgia draft

Russia has rejected a draft UN Security Council resolution on Georgia, saying it contradicted the terms of last week's ceasefire deal, BBC reported.

The draft text called on Russia to pull back its forces to the positions held before the current conflict.

But Russia says the truce allows its troops to stay in a buffer zone on the Georgia side of South Ossetia's border.

Moscow earlier dismissed a Nato warning that normal relations were impossible while its troops remained in Georgia.

The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.

Russia's UN ambassador said the French-drafted UN resolution went against the terms of the ceasefire brokered by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Vitaly Churkin said the resolution should incorporate all elements of the six-point peace plan agreed last week.

He also objected to language in the draft reaffirming Georgia's territorial integrity, saying South Ossetia and Abkhazia did not want to be part of Georgia.

Russia can veto UN resolutions and the ambassador told the BBC that putting the text to a vote would be pointless.

He said: "It's a waste of time because the process of the withdrawal of Russian forces will continue."

Following a rebuke from Nato's 26 foreign ministers in Brussels, Moscow accused Nato of bias in favour of the "criminal regime" in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia risked becoming the "outlaw" of the conflict, in an interview with CBS news on the sidelines of the Nato emergency summit.

Russia says President Dmitri Medvedev told President Sarkozy that by Friday, Russian troops would either be sent home, be pulled back to South Ossetia or to a buffer zone along the border.

Russia said it had begun a pullback on Tuesday as it withdrew 11 military vehicles from the Georgian town of Gori.

A Russian officer told reporters invited to watch that the column was heading for South Ossetia and then home to Russia, but Georgia dismissed it all as a show.

BBC correspondents there say there are still several artillery positions and checkpoints in Gori.

And the operators of the Georgian Black Sea port of Poti told the BBC that Russian forces had seized the commercial harbour.

In an apparent goodwill gesture on Tuesday the two sides exchanged prisoners at a checkpoint near Tbilisi, but on the same day Russia paraded captive Georgians on armoured vehicles.

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