Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has accepted a French-brokered
peace plan calling for an immediate cease-fire with Russia.
Mr. Saakashvili appeared in an early morning news conference (Wednesday) with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Tbilisi.
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev endorsed the peace deal Tuesday during his meeting in Moscow with Mr. Sarkozy.
The Georgian leader said he accepts the main points of the peace plan
-- an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of forces from two Georgian
breakaway regions, and free access for humanitarian aid workers.
But he said there can be no international talks over the future of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- the two Georgian regions that favor
Russia, but which Georgia says it will never give up.
Mr. Medvedev says he has already ordered a halt to military actions in
Georgia. He said Georgia has been punished enough for attacking South
Ossetia last week.
But Mr. Saakashvili said Tuesday that Russian forces are continuing to
attack. He said his country is under foreign occupation and will pull
out of the Commonwealth of Independent States -- a grouping of
ex-Soviet states.
The leaders of five former communist countries -- Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine -- joined President Saakashvili at a
rally in Tbilisi Tuesday to express their solidarity with Georgia and
support for Georgian democracy.
Georgia says 150 people have been killed in the fighting. Russia says
the death toll is at least 15-hundred. There are no independently
confirmed casualty figures.
South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared independence from Georgia in the early 1990s.