MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Monday on pledged to withdraw his forces from Georgian territory outside the breakaway province of South Ossetia within a month.
Dmitry Medvedev, left, listens to Nicolas Sarkozy at presidential residence near Moscow on Monday.
Medvedev said an international summit on the situation in Georgia would be held in Geneva beginning October 15.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy earlier urged Russia to honor its pledge to withdraw its troops from Georgia and warned the Kremlin that the European Union is united on this position.
Sarkozy, whose country holds the European Union presidency, was in Moscow with an EU delegation to hold talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Almost one month after Sarkozy negotiated a truce to a five-day war between Russia and the former Soviet republic, Russian troops remain deep inside Georgian territory.
Georgia and the West say Russia has reneged on its pledge to withdraw from Georgia. However, Russia says the troops are peacekeepers who are permitted under the accord to remain.
The EU is also seeking to deploy several hundred EU monitors to Georgia, but a Russian foreign ministry spokesman said Moscow opposed this, AP reported.
Andrei Nesterenko said the deployment of EU monitors would lead to unnecessary "fragmentation" of international monitoring efforts by the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
CNN's Senior International Correspondent Matthew Chance said it was difficult to see what Sarkozy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, can achieve on their mission.
Sarkozy has been criticized for giving Russia too much leeway in interpreting the terms of the cease-fire deal.
With the 27-nation bloc now so dependent on energy from Russia, Chance said the EU could exert little pressure on Moscow. The EU buys 30 percent of its imported oil and 40 percent of its imported natural gas from Russia.
But at an emergency summit in Brussels last week Sarkozy said Russia had to decide whether it wanted isolation or co-operation with its EU neighbors. He added that while the EU wanted peaceful co-operation "it takes two to tango."
At a Russian checkpoint in Karaleti near South Ossetia, Tamazi Kaidarashvili, an ethnic Georgian, said he hoped the EU would persuade Russia to withdraw its forces.
"As long as the Russian boot is in the Caucasus, there will never be peace," he told AP.
Kaidarashvili had passed through the checkpoint to visit his brother, who lost an arm and a leg after stepping on a mine a week ago and is in a hospital in Gori.
He said Russian soldiers had been stopping at houses in the village to demand food and drink and asking "why are you with the Americans and against us."
Russia has accused the U.S. of propping up Georgia in order to have an ally in the region. Washington last month promised $1 billion in relief to Georgia.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney harshly criticized Russia's military incursion into Georgia on Saturday, calling the action "an affront to civilized standards."
Cheney faulted Russia for invading the country, killing civilians and displacing thousands of Georgians, and failing to abide by a ceasefire agreement from the European Union.
On Sunday Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili said he believed the West would help his country regain control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
"Our territorial integrity will be restored. I am more convinced of this than ever," Saakashvili said on Georgian television, AP reported. "This will not be an easy process, but now this is a process between an irate Russia and the rest of the world."
