WASHINGTON (AFP) — Russia's keeping 7,600 troops in two breakaway Georgia regions is a "clear violation" of the August truce and previous accords, a senior US official charged Wednesday.
Washington is troubled by remarks by Russian leaders that "they were going to keep thirty-eight hundred Russian troops both in South Ossetia and Abkhazia," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
"Thirty-eight hundred in each of those areas separately, for a total of seventy-six hundred, is a clear violation not only of previous accords but the ceasefire accord," McCormack said.
Under international agreements ending armed conflict in the 1990s, he said, Russia had kept about 1,000 troops each in South Ossetia and Abkhazia before August 6 -- with proscribed limits of 1,500 troops in each region.
What we agreed to is getting their troops back to their pre-August 6 positions," he said, referring to the August 12 ceasefire that brought an end to the five-day war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.
"These guys (Russian leaders) at every turn are trying to wriggle out of every commitment they made. We've seen it since August. They need to get out of Georgia. They need to stop finding excuses to do that."
Georgia's August 7 offensive to regain control of South Ossetia from Moscow-backed separatists prompted a massive retaliatory thrust by Russia into Georgian territory from which thousands of Russian troops have yet to withdraw.
Russia argues that it repelled Georgian troops to protect thousands of people whom it had granted Russian citizenship since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The West accuses it of seeking to redraw the map by effectively annexing part of its ex-Soviet neighbor.
Hundreds of people on both sides are estimated to have been killed in the conflict. Tens of thousands fled their homes.
In Moscow on Wednesday, Russia ruled out allowing European Union observers into South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The move directly contradicted claims by Nicolas Sarkozy and threw into doubt a new peace plan the French president had brokered just two days previously with Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.
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