A ceasefire ending the Ossetia war was in tatters on Wednesday with Russian armoured and naval forces violating terms supposedly agreed upon the day before, dpa reported.
A Russian armoured unit drove into the border town Gori, entered a Georgian tank base, and was destroying the installation and carrying off loot, witnesses told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The Russian regular motor rifle unit rode on BMP and BTR armoured personnel carriers and, according to soldiers interviewed, had spent four days driving from Chechnya to the Ossetia sector. There were at least 21 Russian combat vehicles and more than 100 soldiers visible to witnesses.
Smoke was rising from the Gori tank base by mid-afternoon.
Georgian media reported murders of ethnic Georgians in villages near the border between Georgia and Ossetia, but there was no independent confirmation.
Colonel General Anatoly Nogovytsyn, Russia's army chief of staff, speaking at a Moscow press conference flatly denied Russian troops had entered Gori. Witnesses including Gori residents interviewed by dpa accused the Russian government of lying.
Nogovytsyn confirmed earlier Georgian reports Russian forces had taken control of the Georgian port of Poti and had captured and sunk all but two Georgian naval vessels stationed there. The vessels were sunk offshore so as not to interfere with the port's operation, he said.
The twin Russian moves, apparently aimed at demolishing Georgian military infrastructure, ruined a ceasefire agreement seemingly brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday, and approved by Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev on Tuesday.
The de facto ceasefire held for some 12 hours, from afternoon on Tuesday until early Wednesday morning. A key term of the ceasefire was the return of Georgian combat units away from the front home to their bases - a transfer in progress as Russian forces moved on Gori and Poti.
Fighting in the six-day conflict ended shortly after midday Tuesday. Aside from Georgian reports of a pair of Russian airstrikes after that time, combat had appeared halted throughout the region.
Officials in Tbilisi on Tuesday morning announced details of the formal ceasefire agreement suggested by Sarkozy and approved by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Terms included in the document included a total ceasefire, non- interference with humanitarian aid, return of Georgian combat units to their bases, removal of Russian combat forces from the war zone and installation of an international peacekeeper force in South Ossetia.
In Washington, President George W Bush's administration was contemplating ways to punish Russia for the military assault on the pro-Western Georgian government led by Saakashvili, and was focusing on ways to get humanitarian aid to the Georgian population.
"The Russians need to stop their military operations, as they have apparently said that they will, but those military operations really do now need to stop, because calm needs to be restored," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters at the White House.
US retaliation measures will include cancellation of a US-Russia joint naval exercise, Bush's boycott of a NATO meeting with Russia and longer-term US diplomacy aimed at reducing contact between Russia and the G7 group of industrialized nations, US media reported.
The Georgian government formally requested NATO assistance shortly before the ceasefire came into effect, although the Caucasus nation is not a member of the alliance.
Georgia filed a suit in The Hague Court of International Justice alleging Russian "ethnic cleansing" after 58th Army forces moved into South Ossetia and adjacent Georgian territories, government spokesman Aleksander Lomaia said.
Russia also has alleged Georgia carried out ethnic cleansing in its attack on South Ossetia. Russian interrogators were "interviewing" Georgian prisoners of war for evidence, said Vladimir Markin, a Russian Justice Ministry spokesman.
NATO held an emergency meeting Tuesday at its Brussels headquarters, where Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the alliance would not back off its eventual plans to invite Georgia into the organization.
"That situation has not changed," he said.
The Kremlin strongly opposes NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, another former Soviet republic, and has increasingly expressed dismay over the alliance's continued eastward expansion.
Some analysts and US politicians allege that Russia launched the counter-attack to intimidate its neighbours in an attempt to reassert its sphere of influence.
The renewed Russian advances were an embarrassment for Sarkozy, who, as the EU's representative, had acted as the key mediator between Russia and Georgia in the ceasefire talks. The French leader was in Tbilisi on Wednesday, along with the presidents of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Estonia and the prime minister of Latvia.
On the initiative of Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Latvian Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis travelled to Tbilisi on Tuesday to offer their support for Georgia's independence and territorial integrity.
"We are here to take up the fight," Poland's Kaczynski said Tuesday evening at a rally of tens of thousands.
He accused Russia of trying to dominate its neighbours as "in the times before its empire collapsed" in the early 1990s. "We say no," said Kaczynski to great applause.
The Polish president warned that after Georgia Russia could threaten Ukraine, the Baltic states and even Poland.
" Georgia doesn't stand alone. It has the entire civilised world on its side," Ilves said while Yushchenko said that "freedom is worth fighting for."
Georgian media reported Wednesday that the presence of the "foreign presidents" would lead to the eventual installation of an international peacekeeping force in the Ossetia region - long a political goal of the Saakashvili administration.
EU officials on Wednesday seemed to support the idea, suggesting EU troops could indeed assist in Ossetia.
The streets of Tbilisi were practically back to normal Wednesday, with restaurants open and cafes busy, and a government-organized pro- Saakashvili demonstration jamming the Georgian capital's central Shota Rustaveli Street.
The atmosphere in the city was generally more festive than defiant, with tens of thousands of Tbilisi residents taking the night air for the first time since the onset of war on Thursday.
Georgia's banking system re-opened on Wednesday, one day earlier than was planned for a wartime banking holiday.
Civilian officials within South Ossetia and particularly its unofficial capital Tskhinvali were beginning to repair massive damage caused by intense artillery barrages.
Regional authorities were focusing on identifying and burying corpses, and supplying civilian survivors with food and water, said Anatoliy Barankevich, South Ossetia's security council chief, according to an Interfax report.
A bread factory in the region already was functional and loaf production had already begun.
Martial law was in effect, he said.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over the weekend promised close to 500 million dollars of Kremlin reconstruction money for the South Ossetia reconstruction effort.
The Russian military said 74 of its soldiers died in the fighting and 191 others were wounded.
Georgia reported 175 dead soldiers and 500 wounded. Russian authorities said they captured an unspecified number of Georgian troops. Reports of civilian casualties ranged from 200 to 2,000 dead.
The United Nations, the European Union and the United States were mobilizing to deliver humanitarian assistance to refugees. About 25,000 people fled from South Ossetia into Russia, while another 2,000 went to Armenia.