Russia Agrees to Leave Georgia Within Month

Russia promised to remove its troops from Georgia within a month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced today after meeting with Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. But Medvedev made no mention of troops in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia or Abkhazia, promising only to remove them from the rest of the country, and then only once EU monitors were deployed in South Ossetia, the BBC reports.

Medvedev said Russia’s support for the breakaway regions was “irrevocable,” and conditioned all its concessions on Georgian pledges not to use force against them. The two leaders talked for more than 3 hours, along with the EU’s foreign-policy chief, and said there would be full international talks in Geneva on Oct. 15. (More Nicolas Sarkozy stories.)