MOSCOW, Sept 11 (Reuters) - European Union monitors will not be allowed into Georgia's breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his U.S. counterpart on Thursday. Russia drew international condemnation for sending troops to Georgia last month to stop Tbilisi's attempt to retake South Ossetia. Moscow later recognised the two pro-Moscow regions as independent states. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and an EU delegation headed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy struck a deal on Monday, under which Moscow agreed to allow 200 EU monitors to deploy in Georgia. But their mandate immediately became an issue of dispute. The EU delegates view the monitors as a reinforcement to a pre-war peacekeeping force in the region, which can operate anywhere in Georgia. Russia says EU monitors are not part of pre-war international monitoring missions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and should operate under separate rules. The issue was discussed on Monday, when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "The minister stressed that as it was recorded in the (Monday) agreements, additional international monitors will be deployed exclusively in the zones adjacent to South Ossetia and Abkhazia to avert new aggression by Tbilisi," the statement, posted on the ministry's web site www.mid.ru, said. "As far as measures to ensure security inside the two states are concerned, they have already been taken through the deployment of Russian troops under bilateral treaties Russia has with South Ossetia and Abkhazia," it added. Russia said earlier this week it would set up military bases in the two regions hosting a total of 7,600 servicemen, more than two times more than the number of peacekeepers Russia had in South Ossetia and Abkhazia before the war. The United States, which has close ties with Georgia's pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili, is the harshest critic of Russia in the crisis. Washington has indicated it was considering punitive moves against Moscow over Georgia. Russia has urged the United States not to allow strategic cooperation between the two countries to be sacrificed to what Moscow describes as a "failed U.S. project" in Georgia. The Russian Foreign Ministry said Lavrov and Rice discussed issues of bilateral interest "including the schedule of consultations on the problems of strategic stability and a number of international issues, including the Iranian nuclear programme." (Writing by Oleg Shchedrov)
A child plays with toy cars during a protest against Russia's rising petrol prices outside the regional office of state-controlled oil company Rosneft in the southern city of Stavropol September 10, ...
