When Russian warplanes tore through the night skies over the Pankisi Gorge in north-east Georgia last month they sounded a deadly echo from the past for hundreds of Chechen refugees who sought sanctuary in the area during two violent wars of independence against Russia in the 1990s.

"We knew better than anyone what this was about," said Anzor Gaurgashvili, a former policeman from the breakaway Russian republic. "What the Russians did in Chechnya would make any ordinary person's hair stand on end."