Gains Made in 1st Round of Russia-Georgia Negotiations : Unrest: Moscow says that its army units will stay till 1995. Warring troops will pull back.

Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev said Wednesday that Russian army units will stay in Georgia until 1995, and the warring sides in the Georgian province of Abkhazia have agreed to disengage their forces.

Grachev spoke after the first round of negotiations with Georgian Prime Minister Tengiz Sigua and other Georgian officials in Sochi, a resort on Russia’s Black Sea coast.

The negotiations were devoted to the seven-month conflict between Georgian government forces and mainly Muslim separatists in Abkhazia, a province of Georgia bordering on Russia.

The fighting has claimed hundreds of lives and strained relations between the two countries.

One of the main issues in the talks was the future of thousands of former Soviet troops, now under Russian control, who have remained in Georgia since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Georgian leaders have demanded their withdrawal, accusing the Russians of siding with Abkhazian separatists.

“We have definitely agreed with Sigua that our soldiers will stay in Georgia, including Abkhazia, until 1995,” Grachev said in remarks carried by the Itar-Tass news agency.

He said the sides also agreed that both Georgian and Abkhazian forces will pull back to create a 1.9-mile-wide buffer zone.

But the negotiators failed to agree on who should control a former Soviet army seismic laboratory in Eshery, near the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi. The secret installation, reportedly designed to monitor nuclear tests in the Middle East, has often come under Georgian fire.

Grachev said the laboratory will be declared a closed zone and fenced off. “The Georgian side wants our troops to withdraw from there. We insist that the troops stay there,” he added.

Later Wednesday, the sides began discussing the possibility of a cease-fire in Abkhazia, Itar-Tass reported.

Sigua expressed satisfaction with the negotiations, saying that political, military and economic agreements were nearing completion.

“I think that today or tomorrow they will be ready for a Russian-Georgian summit” to be held between President Boris N. Yeltsin and Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze, he told Itar-Tass.