POTI, Georgia — A U.S. Navy destroyer delivered 55 tons of humanitarian aid for war-weary Georgia on Sunday as residents staged a second day of protests against Russian forces still occupying the country.
The USS McFaul, the first of at least three U.S. ships bringing relief supplies to ally Georgia, anchored a mile off the Black Sea coast, where crews used barges to ferry ashore bottled water, nonperishable food, blankets, diapers, cooking utensils and other items.
Stephen Guise, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, said that the ship’s crew would have preferred to dock at Georgia’s deepwater port at Poti but that the port had suffered too much damage to accommodate the destroyer. Batumi’s port is too shallow to accommodate the McFaul.
U.S. military planes already have delivered $13 million in aid to Tbilisi, which is closer to the heaviest fighting of the two-week conflict.
Russian officials didn’t respond immediately to the arrival of the U.S. vessel, but they’ve criticized humanitarian deliveries by other NATO countries, including Spain, Germany and Poland, as fueling tensions in the Black Sea.
Nearly 130,000 Georgians were forced from their homes during two weeks of often heavy clashes between Russian and Georgian forces in the tiny former Soviet republic, according to United Nations estimates.
Russia withdrew most of its soldiers Friday under a cease-fire agreement but is building checkpoints around the pro-Moscow separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as well as in areas far from the conflict zones, sparking anger among many Georgians.
One of the two checkpoints outside Poti is along a river used to transport goods to the interior of the country.
In western Georgia, residents continued to demonstrate against the presence of Russian troops and armored personnel carriers outside the “security zones” demarcated in the cease-fire agreement brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
On Saturday, protesters gathered near one of two checkpoints the Russians have established outside Poti. On Sunday, television images showed scores of protesters gathered near a Russian checkpoint in the northwestern town of Khobi, waving flags and banners that read, “Go home, Russians!” Russian soldiers detained two Associated Press journalists who were filming at the checkpoint in Poti, the news agency reported. The reporters were “roughed up” and their cameras damaged.
Elsewhere on Sunday, a fuel train exploded near the central town of Gori while traveling along the main east-west railway line, sending massive clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky. Georgian officials initially blamed the blast on a land mine planted in the Russian-controlled area, but Georgian media reports later said the cause was under investigation.
