KARALETI, Georgia—Burned houses dot this village in a buffer zone separating the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia from territory controlled by Georgia. The torched homes formed a backdrop for Wednesday’s arrival of European monitors, who residents hope will protect them from further violence.

Villager Zaira Mamagulashvili, 62, said marauders had looted the local store, then blasted it with hand grenades. They also torched 34 of some 300 houses in the village.

The European Union monitors began patrolling Georgian territory more than a month after Georgia’s war with Russia, and the foreigners were welcomed by Georgian residents.

The deployment of the observers paves the way for a promised pullback of the remaining Russian troops from areas they occupied outside South Ossetia and another separatist region in Georgia.

Vitaly Shavishishvili and his relatives are living in a cowshed after looters burned their two-story house and stole two of their vehicles, the 24-year-old said.

“We only count on ourselves,” he said.

In a strip of land Russian officials have called a “security zone,” frightened residents said security has been sorely lacking since the early August war between Russia and Georgia erupted in nearby South Ossetia.

Shavishishvili’s grandmother Lamara Tedliashvili, 65, said the family had “no complaints against the Russian soldiers” who nominally control the area. But she said ethnic Ossetians and others burned houses and looted the village.

Russian forces quickly repelled a Georgian offensive on South Ossetia’s capital and drove deep into Georgia. After partial pullbacks, they remain in control of swaths of territory surrounding South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another separatist province that Moscow recognized as an independent nation after the war.