In the outer office of Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, framed newspaper front pages celebrate last May’s visit by US President George W. Bush to the country he hailed as a “beacon of democracy”. Yet barely an hour’s drive from the capital, Tbilisi, tensions threaten to explode into conflict between Georgian and Russian troops and to undermine Mr Saakashvili’s two-year drive for reform and integration with the west.

The flashpoint is South Ossetia, a slab of land stretching south from the Russian-Georgian border. The region declared independence from Georgia in the Soviet Union’s dying days, sparking fighting in 1991-92 ended by a Russian-brokered ceasefire.