EU hits back at Russia over Georgia monitoring

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia needs to give specific information on alleged Georgian ceasefire violations for EU monitors to act, and so far Moscow has not even provided a telephone contact number, the EU monitoring team said on Friday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday accused the 225 EU ceasefire monitors of "taking a light-hearted view of the situation" following the two countries' brief war in August and called it "a dangerous game with fire."

German diplomat Hansjoerg Haber, head of the EU mission that deployed at the start of the month, told a news briefing the monitors needed details of alleged violations.

"We don't get any details from the Russians. We just get general allegations," he said. "We do our best to survey the area. We cannot entirely exclude it, but we need to be given details in order to verify it."

Haber said relations with the Russians were difficult now that Moscow was exchanging its peacekeeping troops in breakaway Georgian regions with regular forces.

"We literally don't have any telephone number on their side so far. We have been asking for it and I will ask for it again," he said, adding the mission currently had to communicate with the Russians via the Swiss embassy in Tbilisi.

Haber said the EU mission had been "pleasantly surprised" by the lack of serious incidents and called allegations from Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia province of violations "overblown."

"There may have been isolated shootings, but no major incidents have been registered," he said.

Haber repeated a call for EU monitors to be allowed into South Ossetia to investigate violations. "We would be pleased to come over to their side ... to report objectively."

The EU mission is patrolling a former buffer zone around South Ossetia up to a de facto border, but Russia says it will not be allowed to operate inside the breakaway region.

Russia sent troops and tanks into Georgia in August to repel an offensive by the Georgian military to retake pro-Russian South Ossetia, which threw off Tbilisi's rule in 1991-92.

Russia's forces drove the Georgian army out of South Ossetia and then pushed further into Georgia, before pulling back from the buffer zone under a French-brokered deal that led to the sending of the EU monitors.

(Editing by Caroline Drees)