KIEV, Ukraine (The NYT) -- Georgian leaders hope the United States will join the European Union’s monitoring effort along the boundary with two breakaway Georgian enclaves, a step they believe could deter aggression from Russian or separatist forces, a senior Georgian official said Monday.

The European Union’s 246 monitors in Georgia are unarmed civilians and are not allowed into the enclaves, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Russian forces wrested from Georgian control in a short war a year ago. Still, the official, Eka Tkeshelashvili, the secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, said broadening the monitoring mission to include the United States and other nonunion members would make it “politically very costly to Russia to do anything on the ground.”
“It has the potential for reaching a very tangible impact,” she said. “It’s always very hard to think what are the red lines that ultimately Russia might respect, because we saw last year that it passed most of the red lines that we could have imagined.”
The European Union’s members are having an “informal discussion” about whether to invite the United States to participate, a requirement for any such expansion, said Peter Semneby, the union’s special representative for the South Caucasus. He said the European Union has “taken note of the interest on the Georgian side,” but the decision is not yet formally on any agenda.
The question will almost certainly come up this week, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to meet with leaders in Ukraine and Georgia. His visit, after President Obama’s meeting with the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in Moscow, is aimed at reassuring the countries that American support will remain despite an improvement in Russian relations.
Mr. Biden’s reaction to the monitoring proposal will offer one clue to how far that support extends: Participating would assert Washington’s concern over Georgia’s breakaway territories. It would also challenge Russia, which wants the United States to scale back its involvement in post-Soviet republics.
Mr. Biden intends to make it clear on this trip that the United States will not abandon its allies in deference to Russia, said one of his senior advisers. “We will continue to reject the notion of spheres of influence,” Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, said in a conference call with reporters last week. “We will continue to stand by the principle that sovereign democracies have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own partnerships and alliances.”
At the same time, said one American official who was not authorized to speak publicly, “there will also be some tough love in both places.”
The official said Mr. Biden would press both countries to address their failings — mostly economic ones in Ukraine and political ones in Georgia — and also make clear to Georgian leaders that they should have no illusions about using force to reclaim South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Every note Mr. Biden strikes will be analyzed “very, very carefully” in Moscow, said Andronik Migranyan, an analyst in New York at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, a Kremlin-backed research group. Leaders in the Kremlin were impressed by Mr. Obama but consider Mr. Biden’s visit to Kiev and Tbilisi, Georgia, a truer indicator of American intentions, he said.
Mr. Biden could send the message that “sovereignty is equal to anti-Russian policy and anti-Russian sentiment, which means nullifying the results of the Obama and Medvedev and Putin summit,” he said, referring to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Alternately, he said, Mr. Biden could give a different message: “We ask you to be more responsible in your behavior, not to be hostile toward Russia.”
“In this case,” Mr. Migranyan said, “Moscow can really think that Obama took Russia’s concerns seriously.”
A decision about joining the monitoring mission leaves little room for compromise. For more than 16 years, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations operated missions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; Americans participated in both. This year, both were shut down under pressure from Moscow, which argued that the organizations needed to either recognize the enclaves’ sovereignty or leave.
That leaves only the European Union’s mission — civilians who work out of field offices near the edges of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. America’s contribution could be personnel, upgraded equipment or technical assistance like access to satellite images, Ms. Tkeshelashvili said.
David J. Kramer, who was a senior diplomat in the administration of President George W. Bush, said American participation would reinforce powerfully the need for stability along the enclaves’ boundaries. Already, simply by visiting Ukraine and Georgia, he added, Mr. Biden is making it clear that the United States will still respond to post-Soviet countries reaching out.
“This is not a case of the United States forcing its way into regions where it’s not wanted — Georgia wants us there,” said Mr. Kramer, who is also a senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a nonpartisan policy group that studies the relationship between the United States and Europe. “We’re never going to compete with Russia in terms of proximity, and we shouldn’t even try. But these are countries that want closer relations with the United States.”