TBILISI, GEORGIA — Bowing to the reality of vastly superior military might, the Georgian president said Tuesday that he would accept a Russian cease-fire agreement to end a five-day conflict, despite terms that some described as humiliating to his small, proud nation.
President Mikheil Saakashvili, while at times seeming defiant, appears to have all but given up his bid to reclaim two disputed regions on the Russian border. Russia, which said it had suspended a campaign that routed Georgia's U.S.-trained military, continued bombing sites deep in the country hours later.
At a rally attended by thousands of people in Tbilisi, Saakashvili pledged that one day Georgia would beat Russia.
"I promise you today that I'll remind them of everything they have done and one day we will win," he said, according to Reuters.
But analysts said the peace proposal, backed by France and the European Union, left no doubt that Russia won the military conflict of the last several days.
Russia clearly saw the conflict as an opportunity to reassert dominance over an area that it views as part of its historical sphere of influence. Georgia is a former Soviet republic that gained independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has watched with increasing fury as Georgia and other former Soviet states have developed close ties with the United States and Western Europe.
Saakashvili's announcement that he would accept the cease-fire agreement followed hours of military positioning between the Russians and Georgians and diplomatic maneuvering by Western leaders, notably French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to defuse the crisis.
Sarkozy met behind closed doors in Moscow with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, after which Medvedev proposed a six-part peace deal that called for Georgia to return its troops to the positions they occupied before the outbreak of hostilities over control of the pro-Russian enclave of South Ossetia. It called for Georgia's leader to sign a "legally binding document" vowing not to use force and to agree to talks about the future status of South Ossetia and a second secessionist region, Abkhazia, in northwestern Georgia.
Those moves essentially would mean that Georgia would give up claims to the two Russian-backed separatist regions, which lie within Georgia's internationally recognized border, analysts said. Both regions have broken from Georgian control, and Saakashvili had made a priority of bringing them back.
