A Times reporter traveling between Tskhinvali, which is the South Ossetian capital, and Gori saw extensive sections of villages that had been burned. And refugees continued to flee areas through which the Russian military had passed.

Food shortages were also developing.

A railway bridge at Kaspi, east of Gori, was destroyed, apparently after explosives were placed under its spans.

Georgia said the Russians were trying to undermine its economy by destroying civilian infrastructure. General Nogovitsyn said the Russians played no role in the damage.

“We are now in peacetime,” he said. “Why should we be blowing up bridges when our job is to restore?
We are hard at work.”

At least three Mi-24 helicopter gunships, among the most feared weapons in Russia’s conventional arsenal, patrolled the skies to Gori’s east.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has said Russian troops would serve a peacekeeping role to restore order in the territories they had occupied.
There were scenes that belied this.

In Abkhazia, a convoy of Russian military trucks was seen towing away Georgian coastal patrol craft confiscated from a Georgian port on the Black Sea…