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President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia today ordered a halt to the invasion of Georgia, minutes before Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Moscow to try to negotiate a ceasefire.

Mr Medvedev said that Georgia had been punished enough for its attack last week on South Ossetia, a separatist Georgian province which has close ties to Russia.

“The security of our peacekeepers and civilians has been restored,” said Mr Medvedev, in a Kremlin meeting that was screened on Russian national television. “The aggressor has been punished and suffered very significant losses. Its military has been disorganised.”

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• Pictures: Saakashvili dives for cover

The French President hailed Russia's move as good news, and a first step in gaining agreement between the warring sides.

“A ceasefire now has to take shape,” said Mr Sarkozy said, who aims to persuade Mr Medvedev to accept a Europe-backed blueprint for peace. “We must draw up a rapid calendar so that each side can go back to the positions of before the crisis.”

French officials travelling with Mr Sarkozy privately gave their opinion that Moscow had cleanly outmanoeuvered and outfought Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian President, after his ill-advised gambit to retake South Ossetia.

Negotiators now aim to limit the human and diplomatic damage caused by five days of fighting, and to find a structure for keeping the peace in the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Georgia - which has been suing for peace for several days as its military crumbled in the face of the Russian advance - responded cautiously to Mr Medvedev's announcement.

“We will need more evidence, everyone in this situation needs a signed binding agreement,” said Lado Gurgenidze, the Georgian prime minister, speaking from an emergency session of the Georgian parliament.

“Until that happens we are mobilised, we are prepared for everything. I do appreciate it (Mr Medvedev’s gesture) ... but there has been more damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties today.”

Violence is unlikely to end immediately. There has been no order to Russian troops in Georgia to withdraw, and its soldiers have been told to remain on the alert to defend themselves and quell any signs of Georgian resistance.

Russia is insisting that Georgia must pull its troops from the breakaway regions, withdraw its soldiers from a buffer zone around their borders, and pledge not to use force again to solve the conflict.

It has indicated that it feels Mr Saakashvili, whom it accuses of war crimes, should resign, and that it is disinclined to negotiate directly with him.

Five people including a Dutch television journalist died early today in explosions in Gori, 15 miles away from the South Ossetian border. The casualties were at first blamed on Russian fighter jets, but Russia has denied this, and TV footage appears to show that the missiles were fired not by planes but by artillery on the hillside around Gori.

Georgia claims that Russian bomber jets tried today to destroy a strategic pipeline carrying oil to Europe from the Caspian Sea oilfields, dropping three bombs on it which missed or failed to explode.

Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of Russia's general staff, denied any attempt to destroy the pipeline. Russia's aims were to ruin Georgia's military capability, he claimed.

"The peacekeeping measures being carried out now are meant to weaken the military potential of the aggressor to a level that will not allow him even to think about repeating his attempts to occupy” South Ossetia, said Colonel-General Nogovitsyn, in a televised press conference.

Today's trip to Moscow was seen as the biggest test of Mr Sarkozy's diplomatic skills since he won office in May last year.

Forging a common EU position has proved difficult, because of the wide gulf between two camps of member states. Poland and the former Soviet republics from the Baltic wanted an aggressive condemnation of Russian military action, while Italy and to a lesser extent Germany have been unwilling to raise tension with the Kremlin.

Russians on Red Square outside the Kremlin said that they had heard the news of the end of the fighting. "They were taught a lesson," said one middle aged woman, talking of the Georgians. "But it's sad that so many people have suffered."

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