Twenty-four hours after Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, flew into Georgia and demanded the immediate departure of Russian troops, they were on the move yesterday.

However, instead of retreating north into South Ossetia, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting to break away from Georgia, the Russians headed south towards the capital, Tbilisi. They came to a halt only 20 miles outside the city.

A convoy of two Russian tanks, several armoured personnel carriers mounted with heavy machineguns and Russian flags and a few trucks filled with troops took up positions along the main road from Tbilisi to Gori, Stalin’s home town near the South Ossetian border.

The incursion was the deepest into Georgia proper since hostilities began 10 days ago. The troops dug foxholes along a hill only 30 minutes’ drive from the capital, watched by heavily armed Georgian soldiers and police. Men from the rival camps who had been shelling one another a few days earlier suddenly found themselves too close for comfort.

At first, the soot-covered Russian soldiers sat idly on their vehicles, cradling AK47s under the heat of a searing sun. Then a Georgian soldier in US-issued camouflage walked up to them carrying his national flag. Within minutes the two sides were chatting and exchanging cigarettes and water.

“It’s beautiful here,” said one Russian officer as he stepped out of a jeep with tinted windows. “This is a place where one should come on holiday, not war.”

The bonhomie was misleading, however. Some of the Georgian soldiers were visibly stunned to see a foreign army so deep inside their country.

They seemed alarmed that Russian military operations still had not ended four days after President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he had halted them.

The previous day Rice had all but forced Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, to sign a ceasefire that sealed his defeat. Yesterday Medvedev added his signature.

The document, drafted under the supervision of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and amended by the Kremlin, allows the Russian military to remain in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions that Saakashvili had vowed to return to Tbilisi’s control.

Even more damaging for the Georgian leader’s political prospects, it gives the Russians the right to remain several miles inside Georgian territory to await an international peace-keeping force - which could take weeks to assemble.

Since the defeated and demoralised Georgian army pulled out of South Ossetia last week, the Russians have secured or destroyed its military installations and arms dumps.

By yesterday afternoon they had moved back towards South Ossetia but were still positioned on the outskirts of Gori and in the Black Sea port of Poti, where they have blown up several Georgian coastguard vessels.

South Ossetian paramilitaries were also still active in the west of the country where they were reported to be looting Georgian villages. They have been accused of ethnic cleansing, of torching villages and, in several cases, of abducting young women.

The Kremlin gave its strongest signal yet that both South Ossetia and Abkhazia would be integrated into Russia. Saakashvili’s future as president seemed far less certain.

He was vilified by the Kremlin as a US stooge before hostilities broke out. The Russians are now bent on seeing him removed from power. Moscow has dispatched investigators from the prosecutor’s office to South Ossetia to gather testimony that it hopes to use in a criminal case against the president.

In Tbilisi many last week thought Saakashvili’s fate was already sealed. While he is credited with turning round Georgia’s economy and modernising the small state, he is expected to face a furious backlash over the failed military action.

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