Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Aug. 12: Russian army soldiers Pvt. Vladimir Litvinov, front, and Robert Simonian listen to a doctor at the Central Military Hospital in Rostov-on-Don, about 600 miles south of Moscow.

“There were reports of South Ossetian paramilitary fighters killing Georgian civilians, unrestrained by Russian troops.”

MOSCOW — President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia declared on Wednesday that Russian tanks were attacking the strategic town of Gori in central Georgia and that Russian tanks continued to move through the west of the country, hours after the two nations agreed an accord to end the war that flared up last week.

But as antagonisms continued to seethe, Mr. Saakashvili said on Wednesday that the ceasefire was not holding. “As I speak, Russian tanks are attacking the town of Gori,” he said, flanked by Eastern European leaders of other former Soviet satellite states and republics who were in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, to show support.

Whether the agreement takes holds, Russia has achieved its goals, effectively creating a new reality on the ground, humiliating the Georgian military and increasing the pressure on a longtime antagonist, Mr. Saakashvili.

.Georgian authorities and foreign journalists reported that Russian forces continued to attack after Medvedev’s words were broadcast, bombing the frontline city of Gori inside undisputed Georgian territory.

There were reports of South Ossetian paramilitary fighters killing Georgian civilians, unrestrained by Russian troops.

Russian authorities make no secret of their desire to see Mr. Saakashvili prosecuted on war crimes in The Hague, and could well try other measures to undermine him. Mr. Medvedev also authorized Russian soldiers to fire on “hotbeds of resistance and other aggressive actions.” As the conflict cools and hardens, the two separatist regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, could wind up permanently annexed by Russia.

An AP photographer saw several Russian troops and two armored vehicles on the northern outskirts of the city. His driver went further up the road and ran into Russian military volunteers, who warned that Russian forces would soon shell Gori. The two retreated south but no immediate shelling could be heard.

Nogovitsyn said sporadic clashes continued in South Ossetia where Georgian snipers fired sporadically on Russian troops who returned fire. “We must respond to provocations,” he said.

Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze said that Russian forces seized a military base on the outskirts of Gori, situated on Georgia’s only significant east-west road.

Lomaia said that Russian troops also held ground in western Georgia, maintaining control of the town of Zugdidi where they seized the central police station and government buildings and saddling the main highway in the region. He said there had been no fresh clashes since the truce.

Georgia insisted its troops were driven from Abkhazia by Russian forces. At first, Russia said separatists—not Russian forces—had done the job. But the claim rang hollow—an AP reporter saw 135 Russian military vehicles heading toward the gorge Tuesday and Russia is the military patron for the separatists.

Nogovitsyn said Wednesday that Russian peacekeepers had disarmed Georgian troops in Kodori—the very peacekeepers Georgia wants withdrawn. Still, the effect was clear. Abkhazia was out of Georgian hands and it would take more than an EU peace plan to get it back in.

The plan would require Georgia’s military to remain at its bases at distances that don’t threaten South Ossetia, restricting the movement of the country’s troops within its own recognized borders. And it did not include a reference to Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which the government in Tbilisi regards as sacrosanct.

But in Georgia’s capital, which Monday night was rife with fears that Russian tanks would advance into the city, citizens celebrated what they took to be a major Russian step-down. Tens of thousands of people came together in the mood of a victory rally to hear Saakashvili, who spoke proudly of a David-against-Goliath confrontation.

“We don’t yet have peace,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters in Moscow, where he had gone to present the plan to the Russians. “But we have a provisional cessation of hostilities. And everyone should be aware that this is considerable progress. There is still much work to be done.” Sarkozy secured Medvedev’s signature to the plan and then flew to Tbilisi, where Saakashvili said he agreed to the document’s “general principles.”

Russia’s move suggested that tough talk from Western leaders in recent days had succeeded in making Moscow fear a rupture of political and economic relations with their countries. Russia’s relations with the West, already buffeted by a series of issues including a murder case in London and U.S. plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe, seemed on the verge of collapse because of Russia’s offensive in Georgia.

The presidents of five East European countries, four of them members of the European Union and the NATO alliance, flew to Georgia on Tuesday to demonstrate support for Saakashvili. “The Russian state has once again shown its face, its true face,” said Poland’s Lech Kaczynski, who was joined by the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.

Ossetians are a separate ethnic group from Georgians. They broke away from national control in the early 1990s, and tensions have remained high since then. The chronology of events leading to full-scale war remains in dispute, with the Georgians and Russians each claiming that the other was the first to take major aggressive action.

Despite Western governments’ public statements of support for Saakashvili, some Western diplomats now privately say that the Georgian leadership or military made a serious and possibly criminal mistake last week by launching a massive barrage against the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, which inevitably led to major civilian deaths and casualties.

Russian officials have said 2,000 people were killed in the Georgian offensive, a figure that has not been confirmed independently. But it is indisputable that large numbers of civilians were killed in and around Tskhinvali.

Western diplomats involved in trying to end the crisis said the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali was massively disproportionate — as was the Russian response, which clearly involved the bombing of nonmilitary targets.

Russia’s military has denied aiming at a oil pipeline that crosses Georgia, connecting Azerbaijan and Turkey. But craters were visible around the pipeline between the city of Rustavi and Akhali Samgori village, southeast of Tbilisi, according to Georgian and American sources and foreign reporters. In recent days, Russian planes also destroyed a cement factory, hit rail tracks, blockaded a port and created such a climate of fear that trade slowed dramatically.

Georgian officials, speaking privately, said the country has suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and estimated that double-digit growth figures for gross domestic product may plummet, at least in the short term, to 3 percent.

Matthew Bryza, the State Department’s special envoy to the region, told reporters here that Washington was working on a major aid package to stimulate growth and “maintain stability.” He didn’t put a dollar amount on the assistance or say whether it would be structured as loans, grants or both. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has offered the equivalent of about $400 million to rebuild South Ossetia.

Even after Medvedev announced an end to operations, Russia continued to bomb the almost completely abandoned city of Gori, which led to the deaths of civilians, including a Dutch journalist. The city’s central square, dominated by a statue of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who was born in Gori, was shredded with shrapnel from a bombing Tuesday afternoon. There were at least two other strikes on the city Tuesday afternoon, and no strikes were near military facilities in the city.

- Agencies