If European Union foreign ministers approve a ceasefire observation mission to Georgia as expected on Monday, they will be stepping into a diplomatic minefield. Officials in Brussels say that if the bloc does not mandate its observers to cover the whole territory of Georgia, including, crucially, the rebel territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
It will appear to be accepting their independence before international peace talks have even begun. But if the mandate does cover the breakaway regions, the EU will risk an outright rejection of its peace initiative from Russia - something which would cause it a massive loss of face.
"The only thing the EU can do is mandate observers for the whole territory of Georgia, otherwise the main point of the negotiation process would be taken away before it started," Professor Hans-Henning Schroeder, head of research on Russia at the SWPGerman Institute for International and Security Affairs, said.
"But they risk losing credibility if they demand what they can't deliver. If Russia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are not ready to accept EU observers, the EU has no way to push them through," he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. On Monday French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, brokered in Moscow a deal to end Russia's current military occupation of Georgia.
Under the deal, Russia is meant to pull its troops out of the Georgian port of Poti by September 15, and retreat from undisputed parts of Georgia "within 10 days of the deployment of international mechanisms, including at least 200 EU observers, who should be in place by October 1 at the latest." Those observers will be deployed "in the zones adjacent to South Ossetia and Abkhazia," the deal states.
Diplomats say that given the extremely short deadline, the EU's member states have rushed to offer civilian and military experts, with the Baltic states, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden reportedly willing to contribute.
But the key issue remains those experts' mandate, with some EU states pushing for the bloc to stress that it wants them to cover the whole of Georgia, including the breakaway regions. That is because the EU refuses to recognise their independence, and so cannot treat them as anything but integral parts of Georgia.
But the question is not covered in the pull-out plan agreed by Sarkozy - an omission which analysts say puts the mission on very delicate ground. On Wednesday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that any EU promises to send observers into the breakaway territories were simply "unscrupulous" and false.
"There's nothing the EU can do. The Russians are not going to leave (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) and the EU is not going to deploy forces to intervene: it's a fait accompli," Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute of International Relations, told dpa.
That leaves the EU's ministers walking a tightrope between approving a mandate which is so explicit that it provokes Russia into cancelling its withdrawal, and approving one which is so vague it appears to be recognising the rebels' independence.
And that, in turn, means that when the mission deploys, it will be under a mandate which raises as many questions as it answers. "The EU's line is that Georgia is an independent and sovereign state so we can't decide if they'll give up their claim to the territories or not," Piotr Kaczynski of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels told dpa.
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