Instead of withdrawing from Georgian territory under a cease-fire agreement, Russian troops are looting, burning and ethnically cleansing areas under their control, Georgian officials claimed on Monday. Meanwhile, Russian officials denied the charges, and cited ethnic cleansing on the part of Georgians as the source of the recent conflict.
Temuri Yakobashvili, the Georgian minister tasked with overseeing the country's two breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, said that Russian forces were showing no will to withdraw.
"In spite of international efforts Russian troops are still on Georgian soil and they don't give any sign they are going to leave," he said by phone to a forum on the conflict at the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C.
"They are going to the villages, looting villages, evicting people who are not complying with their demands, taking furniture from their houses - classical barbarian behavior, what can I tell you."
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington rejected both claims, saying that Russian troops were pulling back, but needed time to clean up discarded Georgian arms.
"Our troops are being pulled back," Khorishko said in an interview with RTTNews. "You can understand this can take some time because we have to clean away Georgian tanks and armored vehicles left behind by the retreating Georgian army."
These measures are necessary to make sure the weapons "do not get into the hands of the wrong people," he said.
Khorishko also rejected Georgian claims that Russian forces were looting or ethnically cleansing Georgians from areas of South Ossetia.
"The Russian Army has nothing to do with that," he said. "Georgians were conducting ethnic cleansing in the beginning of these tragic events."
The Georgians, he said, used multiple rocket launchers in an attempt to "level the city of Tskhinvali," the South Ossetian capital, which he said was "the only city absolutely destroyed" in the conflict.
Yakobashvili passionately rejected that claim, calling it an "attempt to manipulate world opinion."
"Russia's conducted crimes in South Ossetia and we have all evidence towards that. And we want to prove it to The Hague," he said, referring to the site of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. "This so-called peace enforcement operation was conducted by 1,200 Russian tanks and APCs [armored personnel carriers]. … Russians deployed more tanks than they initially deployed in Afghanistan."
Yakobashvili also warned the leaders of western nations that events in Georgia could have consequences well beyond the borders of the small country.
"Georgia is a fault line of international politics today, and unfortunately the west proved to be not ready," he said.
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