TBILISI, Aug 11 (AFP): Dozens of Russian warplanes staged new raids in Georgia Monday which in turn pounded the Russian-controlled capital of breakaway South Ossetia, the two sides said, as European leaders intensified efforts to head off all-out war.
The foreign ministers of France and Finland put a peace plan to Georgia's president in Tbilisi before heading to Moscow for more crisis talks.
But US President George W. Bush said he had firmly told Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that Moscow's offensive had been "unacceptable."
Georgia's foreign ministry accused Russia of staging the new air attacks.
"More than 50 Russian warplanes are flying over Georgia. Tbilisi was bombed. Bombs hit the village of Kojori and Makhata mountain," said a ministry statement.
The Russian military acknowledged that it has lost 18 soldiers and four planes in the conflict but gave no details of its latest operations.
President Dmitry Medvedev said that "a major part" of the military operation has been completed in South Ossetia -- where the conflict escalated after Georgia launched an operation last week to take back control of the separatist region.
Russian planes bombed radars at Tbilisi airport and hit civilian targets in the city of Gori, an interior ministry spokesman said.
The UN refugee agency said that up to 80 per cent of Gori's population of 50,000 have fled the city -- the main Georgian city near to South Ossetia -- because of Russian attacks.
Russian planes had already bombed a special forces base and an air traffic control centre in the Tbilisi suburbs, the spokesman said. Explosions could be heard from the centre of the capital.
Three Russian soldiers were killed and another 18 wounded by Georgian forces in South Ossetia Monday, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted a South Ossetian spokesman as saying.
Georgian forces pounded the South Ossetian rebel capital Tskhinvali with artillery fire during the night and residents said there had been "many deaths."
A local cleric, Bishop Georgy Pukhati, said: "There was heavy firing all night with rockets and machine guns from the southern side of the city," where Georgian units were active.
Georgia said Sunday it had withdrawn from South Ossetia and offered a ceasefire, but Russia said Georgian troops were still fighting.
"The situation is very tense here. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. There is no water and the city's entire infrastructure is destroyed," the bishop said.
Russia, which has already moved battleships to the Black Sea, is preparing to deploy 9,000 troops to bolster its forces inside a second separatist Georgian region, Abkhazia, a military spokesman was quoted as saying by Interfax.
It will send more than 350 armoured vehicles to add to what is officially a Russian peacekeeping force in the breakaway region, the spokesman said.
Moscow said it had sunk a Georgian naval vessel Sunday.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili had accepted nearly all of a European Union peace plan during meetings in Tsibili.
The European plan calls for a ceasefire, medical help for victims, controlled withdrawals of troops on both sides and eventual political talks.
Kouchner and Finland's Alexander Stubb were to leave for Moscow Monday to see the Russian president and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, said Stubb, current chairman of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy will travel to Georgia Tuesday, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told journalists. Sarkozy is expected to head to Moscow thereafter to try to hammer out a ceasefire, Kouchner said.
The United States, however, strongly criticised Russia. Bush said he had told Russian Prime Minister Putin that the violence in Georgia was "unacceptable."
"I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia," the US president told NBC television.
"I was very firm with Vladimir Putin... just like I was firm with the Russian president."
Vice President Dick Cheney told Saakashvili in a telephone conversation "that Russian aggression must not go unanswered," his office said in a statement.
Russia sent thousands of troops, tanks and air support into South Ossetia Friday after Georgia launched an offensive to seize control of the province, which broke from Georgia in the early 1990s.
The conflict has already forced about 40,000 people from their homes in areas around the conflict zone, an International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman told AFP.
Russia has put the death toll in South Ossetia at 2,000, but this is disputed by Georgia which says it is much lower.
South Ossetia , a patchwork of ethnic Georgian and Ossetian settlements in the mountainous north of the country, has a population of about 70,000, many of whom have been granted Russian passports.
