Four Georgian servicemen were killed and around 20 other people wounded as fighting flared in Georgia between troops and armed groups in the separatist region of South Ossetia, Georgian officials said. The four confirmed deaths were Georgian soldiers, Georgian interior ministry spokesman Guram Donadze said, while most of those wounded were Ossetian civilians, according to an Ossetian spokeswoman interviewed on the Russian radio station Echo Moskvi. South Ossetia's official representative in Russia, Dmitri Medoyev, said on the same station that Georgia was deploying additional armoured vehicles to the region, but that claim was quickly denied by a senior Georgian official. "There is absolutely no need to boost our forces in this area," Georgia's deputy security minister, Gigi Ugulava, said in an appearance on local Georgian television. "Our buffer forces are capable of handling the situation, as last night demonstrated once again," he said. The Georgian government and officials in South Ossetia's self-declared "capital" of Tskhinvali have traded blame over who started the fighting, which has included exchanges of automatic gunfire and occasional mortar shelling. The current round of violence is the most serious since last May and comes amid heightened tensions between Georgia and Russia over the fate of the breakaway region which has demanded either full independence or direct governance from Moscow. Georgia's youthful new president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has vowed to reassert Tbilisi's authority over the entirety of the Caucasus country, which splintered into several separatist regions in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He has received vocal support in that objective from the United States and other western countries, while Russia is increasingly wary over western moves in the Caucasus. Local police said said three of the Georgian victims in the latest clashes were killed near Eredvi, an Ossetian village populated by ethnic Georgians, while most of the Ossetians were wounded in Tskhinvali and several other villages. "The Georgian side is massively shelling the city and isolated locales with high-calibre weapons," Ossetian spokeswoman Irina Gagloyeva said. South Ossetia, a territory located along the Georgia-Russia border which has enjoyed a measure of de facto independence since the early 1990s, is a mosaic of villages inhabited by both ethnic Georgians and Ossetians. There has been a fragile peace in the region for years, enforced by a buffer force comprising Georgian, Ossetian and Russian troops. **PHOTO CAPTION*** South Ossetia Special Forces soldiers patrol a village. (AFP)