Russian army units began withdrawing from central Georgia yesterday morning, Interfax news agency quoted the Russian Defense Ministry as saying.
“Units of the follow-up forces, which were earlier brought into the conflict zone, are being pulled back now,” Interfax quoted a ministry spokesman as saying.
The units were pulling back from the Georgian town of Gori, it said.
The Defense Ministry could not immediately be reached to confirm the report.
In Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, a television cameraman was woken by the noise of a military convoy passing through the town. The capital is close to the border with the rest of Georgia.
He saw around 30 tanks and about 20 other military vehicles passing through Tskhinvali from the direction of the Georgian border, but could not confirm their destination.
His footage showed a column of what appeared to be eight Russian T-72 tanks led by a police car.
Russian forces on Wednesday dug foxholes and built a sentry post in a part of central Georgia far outside the security zone they are authorized to remain in after the mandated pullout.
Russian soldiers at a checkpoint waved through a convoy of flatbed trucks carrying badly needed food to one of the areas worst hit by the fighting that started on Aug. 7. But conditions throughout much of the country remained tense amid uncertainty about the intentions of the Russian forces that drove deep into Georgian territory.
At a military training school in the mountain town of Sachkhere, a Georgian sentry said he fears Russian forces will make good on their threat to return after a tense confrontation the day before.
The sentry, who gave his name only as Corporal Vasily, said 23 Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and heavy guns showed up at the base on Tuesday and demanded to be let in. The Georgians refused and the Russians left after a 30-minute standoff but vowed to return after blowing up facilities in the village of Osiauri, he said.
Georgia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that Russian soldiers destroyed military logistics facilities in Osiauri, but the claim could not immediately be confirmed.
The Georgian sentry said the school itself had no heavy weapons or other significant strategic value, unlike the military base raided by Russians at Senaki, near the port city of Poti.
Russian soldiers were setting up camp in at least three positions in west-central Georgia. Further east, soldiers were building a sentry post on a hill outside Igoeti, the closest point to the capital, Tbilisi, where Russian troops have maintained a significant presence.
A top Russian general, meanwhile, said Russia plans to construct nearly a score of checkpoints to be manned by hundreds of soldiers in the so-called security zone around the border with South Ossetia.
A cease-fire, which calls for both sides to pull back to their pre-fighting positions, allows Russia to maintain troops in a zone extending 7km into Georgia along the South Ossetian border.
Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of the Russian general staff, told a briefing on Wednesday that Russia will build a double line of checkpoints totaling 18 in the zone, with about 270 soldiers manning the frontline posts. He said the security zone would be 40km from Gori, but the city is significantly closer to the zone’s presumed boundaries than that.
The plans clearly show Russia aims to completely solidify control of South Ossetia. The province, for now, technically remains a part of Georgia, but Russia has said it will accept whatever South Ossetia’s leaders decide about their future status — which is almost certain to be either a declaration of independence or a request to be incorporated into Russia.
Western leaders have stressed Georgia must retain its current borders.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
RSS