In the village of Irganeti not a living creature is to be seen – not a chicken, pig or goat. Normally, Georgian villages are a riot of livestock and farmers, tractors and carts – a rustic chaos played out among verdant fruit orchards. Irganeti, however, is deep within the newly created Russian “buffer zone” around South Ossetia and all the houses have been torched.

Nothing moves, and an eerie calm prevails until the rare traveller suddenly stumbles upon an abandoned garage full of well-armed South Ossetian militiamen. Next to them a sandbagged wall marks what Russia declared last week to be the newest border in Europe.

The desolate scene is reminiscent of Bosnia or Kosovo, and Georgian officials have labelled this area a zone of “ethnic cleansing” too. Certainly, not a house in this small village appears to have survived the work of arsonists: flame-licked windows devoid of glass, empty doorways, caved-in roofs, the skeletons of houses all the starker for being in the middle of orchards where the plums and pears hang on the trees.

Order is returning to the area slowly, though few people remain to appreciate it. The Russians have stopped allowing South Ossetian militias into the zone of Georgian villages, survivors told The Times yesterday – although not before the paramilitaries had stripped the place like locusts.

A Russian military ambulance offering medical support was one of the few vehicles being driven in the deserted country lanes, which are dotted with cars smashed by tanks or abandoned as people fled the Russian and Ossetian onslaught.

“The Russians are starting to control the situation,” said Shura Terashvili, 68, one of the few people left in the village of Brotsleti, south of Irganeti. “Yesterday a Russian armoured vehicle stopped and asked if everything was okay. There have been some food shipments from Tbilisi too,” she said, adding that she rarely ventured on to the main road for fear of what she might run into.

Two women venture out of their yards. “At night we are scared and gather together. There’s no water, electricity. All the animals have been stolen. The Ossetians stole everything they could and killed the rest,” Natela Jobinashvili, 54, said.

Zhenia Archvadze, 80, from a near-by village, said that the South Ossetian irregulars forced her brother to load all his possessions into their car and then beat him up, even though he told them that his mother had been Ossetian and begged them on his knees not to hit him. “I fled from Eredbi in the clothes I have on me,” she sobbed. “What can I do? Everything I had is gone.”

The Russian “buffer zone” starts at the small town of Karaleti, about 10 miles (15km) south of the newly declared South Ossetian border point at Irganeti. Beyond the small army base that the Russians are entrenching on Georgian soil, and where they allow through vehicles after checking for weapons, life in Karaleti goes on almost as normal. Driving farther into the zone, the villages quickly become a string of ghost towns.

Russian army columns and the occasional tank trundle down the road, and halfway through the zone a second Russian base has its own check-point, tanks and a tower with the initials “MC” – Russian for “peace-keeping forces” – stencilled on the side. Russian soldiers, one of them wearing broken rubber sandals on his feet, check drivers’ papers but let people through.

Driving north, the number of villagers sitting by the empty road dwindles rapidly until, in Irganeti, there is simply no one left. Asked where the people are, one of the tough-looking South Ossetian militiamen grunts: “What people? They are refugees. They can’t come back. If somebody enters your home and tries to kill you, you can’t live with them,” he said, referring to the Georgian offensive last month to take back the breakaway region by force.

“This is the border with Georgia now,” the paramilitary said.

Only 50 miles to the south, in Tbilisi, tens of thousands of flag-waving Georgians formed a vast human chain around the centre of the capital yesterday, a display of unity and an appeal for support from the West to reunite Georgia with its breakaway republics.

Lamana Obalava, a grandmother who fled the last round of fighting in Abkhazia in 1992, said that ethnic Georgians could live with their Abkhazian neighbours if Russia would allow them to return. “No one believes the Abkhazians don’t want to live next to us. It’s all Russian agitation,” she said, standing among thousands of cheering Georgians.

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