Russian troops started pulling back from a buffer zone outside Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia region yesterday, two months after a brief war that fueled tension between Moscow and the West.

Russia said the pullback had begun and is expected to have been completed last night.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, speaking in France yesterday, said Russian forces would leave areas in Georgia around South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist region, by (yesterday) midnight.