The Russian armed forces said on Monday they had started to withdraw troops from the conflict zone in Georgia in accordance with a French-brokered peace plan but Tbilisi and a US official said they saw no signs a pullout had started.

”The pull-out of peacekeeping forces started today,” , Col-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the general staff, told a daily official briefing. However, a senior US official told Reuters there were no signs yet that a planned Russian pullout had begun.