TSKHINVALI, GEORGIA — A visit to this war-strafed city Sunday turned up no proof of Russian claims that more than 2,000 people died here. Nor were there any ready signs of what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin referred to as "genocide."
The downtown of Tskhinvali, the capital of Georgia's breakaway republic of South Ossetia, sustained heavy damage in a five-day barrage of rockets and missiles as Russian troops and their local allies battled Georgian forces, and dozens of deaths have been documented. There is still no running water in the city, and residents are tremulous and shellshocked.
Tskhinvali Regional Hospital had confirmed the deaths of 40 people as of Sunday, though the number was expected to grow, said Tina Zakharova, an Ossetian doctor who showed The Times a log of deaths. That figure included both civilians and combatants: people who died at the hospital, whose bodies were brought to the hospital or whose families reported burying their dead in villages.
It has been more than a week since Georgia launched a military operation in South Ossetia, to bring the pro-Russian rebel region under the control of the central government. Instead, Georgian soldiers met a humiliating defeat in an overwhelming Russian counterattack.
South Ossetian authorities are still laboring to figure out how many people died in the battles for the capital, Zakharova said. The task was complicated because some families simply buried their dead in their yards, unable to bring the corpses to the hospital to be registered. "There will be more," she said.
Russian officials have claimed that the city was flattened, comparing the wreckage to the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II. Leaders in Moscow have repeatedly used the term genocide, and spoke of thousands of corpses.
Burned-out tanks remain scattered on the streets of Tskhinvali, but the city's roads and bridges remain basically unscathed. Many buildings had windows shattered and roofs destroyed; some appear to have caught fire and burned to charred shells. The streets around the government center seem to have borne the brunt of the fighting, but few walls appear to have fallen in the assault.
"You can't explain how it felt. It was horrible," said Soslan Borisovich, a vice colonel with the breakaway republic's militia, who fought alongside Russian troops and manned a checkpoint at the southern edge of Tskhinvali. "For two days, the ground was shaking nonstop."
