An uneasy calm in a key Georgia city

updated 6:34 p.m. ET Aug. 15, 2008

GORI, Georgia - Under a statue of Josef Stalin, the best-known product of this city, a Russian and a Georgian were discussing the war. The Georgian was wearing a T-shirt and track pants. The Russian was in uniform, holding an AK-47.

The Georgian, Archil Tadianidze, lives in Gori and was talking about militia fighters from the breakaway province of South Ossetia who had joined with Russian volunteers to rampage in and around Gori.

“They killed civilians in the villages,” he said.

“Now we’ve gotten tough with them, but where were your police?” answered the Russian, Andrei Pilipchuk, an Interior Ministry spokesman who had accompanied a handful of journalists here.

“They left,” Tadianidze said.

As diplomats try to get a cease-fire agreement between Georgia and Russia signed and put into place, an uneasy kind of calm has settled on Gori, occupied by the Russians and situated just south of South Ossetia.

Russian armored vehicles rattle down near-empty streets, and the few remaining residents line up for bread and talk with the soldiers, who have restored a semblance of order. Many of the people who are left are rattled or frightened.

Most buildings appear intact, though a few on the outskirts were burned. Electricity is scarce, and there are very few people left, most of them men or elderly. Younger people fled into the mountains or to Tbilisi.

A woman in her 40s named Manana Labadze, wearing a shabby black dress and worn-out shoes no better than slippers, was outside Gori near a Russian-occupied artillery base. She was carrying a bag with a coat and nectarines.

She was so scared and shell-shocked that when she saw Russian soldiers, all she could do was start handing out the nectarines, and read from a small book of poetry she was carrying in the bag.

“My home is over there,” she told a reporter, “but I’m hiding in a basement at my relatives’. I’m scared.”

On Friday, a reluctant Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said he had signed a cease-fire agreement, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had been assured the Russian president would sign an identical document.

The cease-fire would require Russia to withdraw its combat forces from Georgia but allows Russian peacekeepers to remain in the breakaway region of South Ossetia and conduct limited patrols outside the region.

In Gori, the Russian presence is strategically critical: Gori sits along only Georgia’s only significant east-west highway, which means occupying the city allowed the Russians effectively to split the nation in two.

As in many parts of Georgia, aid has been slow to come. On Thursday, staffers from the United Nations refugee agency and its World Food Program hoped to enter Gori to assess whether it was safe to deliver humanitarian aid.

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