The fighting between Russia and Georgia over the separatist enclave of South Ossetia appeared to ignite in a sequence of improvised if macho moves, fuelled by overblown rhetoric on both sides, overbidding by Tbilisi and overreaction by Moscow. But Russia - in this conflict manifestly led by the prime minister Vladimir Putin rather than Dmitry Medvedev, his successor as president - needs to consider very carefully where its wholly disproportionate action is going to leave Russia's standing in the world.
It may well be the case that Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, made a serious blunder and thought he could seize back control of South Ossetia, lost in 1992 after the break-up of the Soviet Union led to the fragmentation of some of its former republics. It could be, as he claims, that Tbilisi was responding to provocations by Russia's allies in the rebel province. Either way, he miscalculated.
For Georgia that probably means the loss of all South Ossetian territory, and maybe more. The conflict is now spreading to Abkhazia, the other Georgian enclave prised away from Tbilisi by Moscow, where Russian forces have given the Georgians an ultimatum to abandon the Kodori gorge.
But while Mr Saakashvili looks reckless, Moscow's response, using vastly superior forces not only to drive Georgian troops out of the devastated South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali but to pound civilian and military targets inside Georgia itself, makes Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev look like the rogues in this deadly and lamentable affair.
What does Russia want from this? The Putin project has always had as its centre the projection of rebuilt state power and the recovery of Russian pride after the humiliations of losing the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Yet, although it can claim to have achieved much of this, the Russian leadership continues to behave like a paranoid bully, unreconciled to the loss of empire. To be fair, the way the western alliance has pushed ever closer to Russia's borders through the European Union and Nato, supported civic uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine and, to Russian eyes, so casually connived in the secession of Kosovo from Serbia and Kurdistan from Iraq, does appear threatening. Nato's dalliance with Georgia, moreover, may have encouraged Mr Saakashvili to overplay his hand. Nevertheless, it is not the EU and Nato that have courted Russia's former vassals, but they who have rushed into western arms out of mistrust of Moscow.
That will not change as long as an autocratic Russia believes destabilising parts of its near abroad is in its national interest, in stark contrast to a democratic EU designed to spread stability and prosperity.
Russia's behaviour in the southern Caucasus is a reversion to spheres of influence and balance of power politics. If Moscow really believes the west is behaving the same way, that is the sort of difference a new strategic partnership with the EU would resolve. This way, it will never get one. In fact, Russia will never get to where it wants to be in the 21st century by behaving like a 19th-century power.
