Berlin - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has called for an international probe into the conflict over Georgia's breakaway provinces in an interview published Friday by the daily Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.

It was necessary to shed light on who was responsible for what aspects of the escalation that led to a brief war last month when Russian troops entered South Ossetia and penetrated further into Georgia, Steinmeier said.

"This cannot be cleared up overnight and probably never completely," the foreign minister told the newspaper.

A probe could help in the medium- and long-term relations between the conflict parties, he said.

Neither Georgia nor Russia has backed an inquiry of this sort.

"I nevertheless advise both sides to open themselves into an independent investigation into events at the beginning of August," Steinmeier said.

Steinmeier acknowledged the conflict had had an impact on relations between the European Union (EU) and Russia.

But he called for relations to return regulated basis.

"A return to the patterns of the Cold War is not an attractive alternative to the laborious undertaking to return to an ordered way of doing business," he said. (dpa)