U.S. ships Georgia aid
BATUMI, Georgia (Reuters) - A U.S. Coast Guard ship carrying aid for victims of Georgia's brief war with Russia arrived on the country's Black Sea coast on Wednesday, but backed down from docking in a Russian-patrolled port.
The decision avoided any direct confrontation between U.S. and Russian military in Georgia, a U.S. ally whose drive for NATO membership had antagonized Moscow even before Tbilisi's failed drive to retake a pro-Moscow rebel region this month.
The cutter Dallas docked in Batumi instead of Poti, a port 80 km (50 miles) to the north where Russian troops have been manning checkpoints since pushing into Georgia proper this month after a war over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.
Russia, which on Tuesday recognized the independence of South Ossetia and a second Georgian rebel region, Abkhazia, has defied Western pressure to remove its forces from Georgia.
Moscow has said its troops will continue to patrol Poti, a small oil shipment and dry grain port outside a "buffer zone" where Russia plans to post peacekeepers indefinitely.
The U.S. embassy in Tbilisi originally said the Dallas would be joined in Poti by a U.S. warship, the USS McFaul, which docked in Batumi on Sunday. But the embassy said late on Tuesday that the plan had changed.
"This decision was taken at the highest level of the Pentagon," a U.S. embassy spokeswoman told Reuters.
A U.S. Navy official said the U.S. guided-missile destroyer McFaul had left the Black Sea port of Batumi and was "outside of Georgian territorial waters."
"The McFaul is conducting operations in the Black Sea," the official said. He declined to elaborate.
A third vessel, the Navy command ship USS Mount Whitney, has also been loaded with aid supplies and has left its home port in Italy, said U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Tamsen Reese.
WATCHING NATO
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has accused Washington of delivering weapons to Georgia by sea, but made clear Russian ships would not obstruct the operation.
"What the Americans call humanitarian cargoes -- of course, they are bringing in weapons," he told the BBC in an interview on Tuesday, adding: "We're not trying to prevent it."
A White House spokesman rejected Medvedev's accusations of U.S. ships bringing in weapons as "ridiculous".
Nevertheless, the Russian military said on Wednesday it was monitoring the increasing number of NATO warships operating in the Black Sea.
"Given the build-up of NATO forces in the Black Sea area, the (Russian Black Sea) fleet has also begun taking measures to monitor their activity," Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian military's General Staff, told a news briefing.
(Writing by Matt Robinson and Jon Boyle; Editing by Dominic Evans)
