EU leaders to meet with Medvedev

Cease-fire, troop drawback on the agenda

An Ossetian woman yesterday cried amid the rubble of her house destroyed during the Russian assault in Tskhinvali, regional capital of South Ossetia. Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations after the five-day war. (Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press)

AVIGNON, France - European foreign ministers met informally over the weekend in the palace here where popes once ruled, but the talk was mostly about the Third Rome, as the Russians like to call Moscow.

A senior European Union delegation, led by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is to go to Moscow today to meet with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. Its goal is to get Russia to withdraw its troops from Georgia and finally comply with the six-point cease-fire agreement the two negotiated last month.

But there was significant doubt here that today's mission, deputized at an emergency European Union summit meeting on the Georgia crisis a week ago, would produce significant, concrete results.

"There's a great deal to do, with a lot of details, and not much time on Monday," said a European Union official who will travel with Sarkozy, who will also visit Georgia. Like several other officials interviewed for this article, he spoke on condition of anonymity according to diplomatic rules.

A senior French official said the mission could not resolve the entire crisis but had two main aims. The first is the withdrawal of Russian troops from what diplomats termed "Georgia proper," the parts of Georgia beyond the boundaries of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two ethnic enclaves that Russian troops seized and that Russia quickly recognized as independent.

The second is to persuade the Russians to agree to a European Union monitoring group, as the cease-fire agreement called for, and establish its area of responsibility.

The roughly 200 monitors, ideally with a UN mandate, would replace Russian peacekeepers in the security zone outside the two enclaves and in other disputed areas, and enable Russian troops to pull back, as Russia agreed, to positions they held before the crisis started Aug. 7.

The Europeans want Russia to accept the appointment of a representative to run the "international mechanism" overseeing the monitors, but Russia will probably insist on involving the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, in which it has a strong voice.

Then, under the cease-fire plan, talks are to start on the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, though details remain vague and must be negotiated.

The meeting's participants had no ready answer to the Russians' violation of Georgian territorial integrity, which the European Union has condemned as unacceptable, and no expectation that Russia would readily relent.

The phrase "Georgia proper" was frequently heard this weekend to describe Georgia without the enclaves. "I agree it's a dangerous phrase," the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said. "But the facts on the ground have been imposed."

Sikorski was said to be the strongest voice inside the closed meetings for a hard line with Russia and a strong statement of support for Ukraine, which meets with the European Union tomorrow.

The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, expressed concern as to whether Moscow would regard the boundaries of the two ethnic enclaves as "hard or soft," specifically whether foreign monitors could work inside South Ossetia and Abkhazia to investigate reports of ethnic cleansing and violence against civilians.

The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, proposed an international inquiry into the outbreak of the war, an undertaking that Russia welcomes, having accused Georgia of aggression.

In response, Miliband said that he was more interested in how the war was conducted, and that "any allegation in respect of human rights abuse" should be investigated, a perspective that Georgia welcomes.

Correction: Because of an editing error, a caption with a story on yesterday's World pages about European Union leaders meeting on the Georgian crisis mischaracterized the assault on the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. It was attacked by the Georgian Army.