Sarkozy threatened to leave stormy Russian talks

By Francois Murphy

TBILISI (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to walk out of stormy talks with Russian officials before securing a deal with President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday on withdrawing troops from Georgia, a French official said.

The four-hour talks at a castle near Moscow yielded an agreement by Russia to completely withdraw its forces from Georgia's heartland in a month but it did not commit to scale back its military presence in two Georgian separatist regions.

Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, hailed the deal as a victory for European diplomacy and said that if the agreement is implemented, much death and suffering will have been avoided.

But his and Medvedev's smiles at a joint news conference hid a more fraught atmosphere in their closed-door meeting, which was also attended by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

"There were very tense moments," a senior official in Sarkozy's office told reporters after the deal was announced.

The agreement was a follow-up to a six-point peace plan Sarkozy brokered between Moscow and Tbilisi a month ago, but which the West says Russia had only implemented about half of.

The original deal said both sides should withdraw to the positions they held before a brief war last month in which Russia's forces overran Georgia's smaller army after Tbilisi tried to retake control of the rebel region of South Ossetia.

Moscow said a provision in the deal allowing it to conduct 'additional security measures' permitted the stationing of troops in a buffer zone around the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia -- an interpretation Tbilisi, and the West, deny.