When Angela Merkel, German chancellor, visited Tbilisi on Sunday, she told a press conference with Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president: "If it wants to, Georgia will become a member of Nato."
The comment was widely interpreted as signalling a U-turn in German foreign policy - wrongly so, it turns out. Despite the kind words and Ms Merkel's demand, two days earlier, that Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, pull his troops out of Georgia, Germany has no intention of abandoning it policy of engagement with Moscow.
In a virtually unnoticed comment made in Tbilisi, Ms Merkel made clear that Berlin still had misgivings, expressed at a Nato meeting in Bucharest last April, about the launch of membership talks with Georgia.
"The question we discussed [in Bucharest] was whether the Membership Action Plan should kick in at a specific date," she said. "There was a disagreement. I cannot say today when this process will start. I want to make it clear that what we said in Bucharest is just as valid today as it was then."
Conservative politicians in Berlin echo Ms Merkel's view. The conflict in the Caucasus, they insist, should neither speed up nor slow down Georgia's membership application. Nor should Germany take the clash as a pretext to freeze its rapport with Moscow.
"There will be no change in the German position on Nato membership," says Eckart von Klaeden, a Merkel confidant and Christian Democratic foreign policy expert in parliament. "It would be wrong to depart from the Bucharest position at this stage."
Asked last week about signals from the US suggesting Russia should be expelled from the Group of Eight leading industrial nations, Mr von Klaeden said: "It is way too early for such a step. I do not think it would bring anything. I do not even know if it could be done."
The remarkable thing about the events of the past week, says Hans-Henning Schröder, head of the Russia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, is not how Ms Merkel changed her mind - she did not - but how the chancellery and foreign ministry stuck to the same line.
There was no repetition of the clash seen after Ms Merkel hosted the Dalai Lama earlier this year. Despite the fact that Ms Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her foreign minister, are likely to run against each other at next year's general election, "chancellery and foreign ministry agreed that this issue was too important to be used for electoral self-promotion", Mr Schröder says. "What we saw was a spectacular foreign policy mistake by Russia. We must hope that in a month or two, when they calm down, the Russians will fall back into line."
He says Washington often fails to appreciate "how intricately bound Russia and the EU are geographically and economically. Sixty per cent of Russian exports go to Europe. If we stop buying their gas, there will not be anyone else to sell it to."
Thus conservative allies of Ms Merkel, usually fast to rail against Mr Steinmeier's allegedly pro-Russian line, have been backing the foreign minister's insistence that all channels of communications, including the G8 and the Nato-Russia council, remain open.
In a note posted on his website, Ruprecht Polenz, CDU chairman of parliament's foreign affairs committee, writes that Moscow's attitude "is better addressed via co-operation and dialogue than through attempts to isolate Russia".
Both Ms Merkel and Mr Steinmeier have also resisted blaming Russia for the conflict.
