"No casualties have been reported, but several buildings in the villages that came under fire were heavily damaged," a spokesman for the Georgian Foreign Ministry said.
The diplomat said that according to local police and witnesses prior to the attack two helicopters had violated Georgia's air space flying from the Abkhazian side of the border and the artillery shelling had also originated from the same direction.
"We informed UN observers and Russian peacekeepers [about the attack] right after the shelling started," a local police source said.
But the Russian Air Force has denied the reports calling the incident mere provocation.
"The report by Georgian authorities alleging that a part of the Kodori Gorge where the villages of Azhara, Gentsvishi and Chkhalta are located, came under attack of a helicopter that presumably flew from Russia, is nothing but a pure provocation," Air Force spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky said.
It is not the first time Georgia has accused Russia and the breakaway republic of Abkhazia of violating a ceasefire agreement signed to end a bloody war that broke out after the separatist region proclaimed its independence in the early 1990s.
Abkhazia has not been recognized as a sovereign state either by Tbilisi or by the international community. Moscow supports the self-proclaimed republic's bid for independence, and has said that if the United Nations grants full sovereignty to the Serbian province of Kosovo, it should act the same way toward Abkhazia.
Georgia's pro-Western government, which came to power on the back of a "rose" revolution in 2003, is determined to bring Abkhazia back under its control.
Latest talks to resolve a long-running conflict between the post-Soviet Caucasus nation and its rebellious region broke off in July last year when Tbilisi moved security forces into the Kodori Gorge and established a local administration formed with Abkhaz political exiles.
