GORI, Georgia — Russian forces lingered deep in Georgia on Thursday, digging trenches and setting up mortars a day before Kremlin officials promised to complete a troop withdrawal from this former Soviet republic.
But a top Russian general said it could be 10 days before the bulk of the troops left, and the mixed signals from Moscow left Georgians guessing about its intentions nearly a week after a cease-fire deal.
Strains in relations between Russia and the West showed no improvement. NATO, Moscow’s Cold War foe, said Russia had halted military cooperation with the alliance, underscoring the growing division in a Europe that had seemed destined for unity after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Western leaders remained adamant that Russia remove its troops and do it quickly. “The withdrawal needs to take place, and needs to take place now,” Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said in Crawford, Texas.
While refugees from the fighting over the South Ossetia region crammed Georgian schools and office buildings, a scattering of people left in a half-empty village said they were badly in need of basics.
“There is no bread, there is no food, no medicine. People are dying,” said Nina Meladze, 45, in the village of Nadarbazevi, outside the key crossroads city of Gori. She said she stayed because she could not leave elderly relatives behind while other villagers fled to the capital, Tbilisi.
She said the village has been virtually abandoned since the war broke out. “I cannot go on like this anymore, I cry every day,” she said.
Russian troops still controlled nearby Gori, which straddles Georgia’s main east-west road, and the village of Igoeti about 30 miles west of Tbilisi. On the road between Gori and Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s battered capital, Russian soldiers built high earthen berms and strung barbed wire in at least three spots.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev promised earlier that his forces would pull back as far as South Ossetia and a surrounding security zone by today.
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov reiterated that late Thursday, saying the troops would begin pulling back toward South Ossetia on this morning and be finished by day’s end.
But the commander of Russian land forces, Gen. Vladimir Boldyrev, said it would take about 10 days for troops not involved in manning the security zones to complete their withdrawal to Russia, moving “in columns in the established order.”
That suggested Russian soldiers could still be holding territory in Georgia up to the end of August.
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