RUSSIA has agreed to completely withdraw troops from Georgia's heartland inside one month, but there was no commitment to scale back its military presence in two Georgian separatist regions.
The invasion last month, in which Russian troops were sent deep into Georgia in response to an attempt by Tbilisi to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia, drew condemnation from the West and raised fears for the security of energy supplies.
After four hours of talks at a neo-Gothic castle outside Moscow, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, and Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, announced an agreement to pull back hundreds of Russian troops still stationed in buffer zones inside undisputed Georgian territory.
Mr Sarkozy said yesterday: "If all this happens as we have indicated … that would mean that in a little more than a month, the conflict that could have had much worse human consequences would be stopped.
"I mean the guns will fall silent."
In contrast to Russia's conciliatory tone with the European Union over Georgia, tensions with the United States flared up yesterday when Russia said it was sending warships for exercises in the Caribbean Sea, its biggest deployment there since the Cold War.
The United States said it was rescinding a US-Russian civilian nuclear pact, saying the time was not right for the agreement "given the current environment".
Mr Sarkozy, accompanied by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, and Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, flew from Moscow to Tbilisi to meet Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, later yesterday.
