EU Observers Launch Georgia Peace Mission

Some 350 European Union observers took up work in Georgia on Wednesday to monitor a ceasefire and oversee Russian troop withdrawal following the August war in the Caucasus state.

The mission is intended to help ensure the implementation of the six-point plan, negotiated by EU President Nicolas Sarkozy with the Russian and Georgian governments in September. The most important point is the withdrawal of Russian troops from areas of Georgia proper occupied in August.

The EU had hoped to get Moscow's forces to withdraw from the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev categorically ruled that out.

European leaders were forced to accept less than they wanted.

"This is all really very incomplete, as I and everyone else know," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in late September. "But in the first instance it was for us a matter of getting a date for a Russian withdrawal from the parts of Georgia that border with Abkhazia and South Ossetia."

But statements like that underscore how little actual pressure Brussels can bring to bear on Moscow