TBILISI, Georgia — Russian soldiers and armored vehicles pulled back from positions deep in western Georgia on Saturday, meeting a withdrawal deadline a month after the war between the former Soviet republics.
A Georgian police officer was shot dead near the edge of a breakaway Moscow-backed province, adding to tensions in areas where Russian troops are supposed to cede control to unarmed European Union monitors within weeks.
Georgia’s government, meanwhile, pressed its claim that ethnic Georgians are being persecuted in South Ossetia, the separatist region at the heart of the war. Officials said Ossetian paramilitary fighters doused Georgians with kerosene and ordered them to leave their villages.
The New York-based activist group Human Rights Watch also has accused Ossetians of engaging in systematic harassment of Georgian civilians since the war.
South Ossetian government spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva called Georgia’s latest allegation “a complete lie.”
“With such messages, the Georgians are trying to justify their aggression against us,” she said.
Starting before dawn, hundreds of Russian soldiers packed up their gear and abandoned earthen-walled bases they had set up on the outskirts of the Black Sea port of Poti and at three other places in western Georgia that they had promised to leave by Monday.
“They have fulfilled the commitment” made in an agreement worked out by French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week, Georgian Security Council chief Alexander Lomaia told The Associated Press.
But Lomaia said that even with the departure of those 250 soldiers and 20 armored vehicles, about 1,200 Russian soldiers remained at 19 positions inside Georgia.
He stressed that Georgia — like the European Union and the United States — demands a full Russian withdrawal to prewar positions, in accordance with a cease-fire that Sarkozy brokered a month ago.
Russia is not willing to do that and is tightening its grip on the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
