Russia and Georgia were on the brink of war last night after Moscow responded to a Georgian offensive in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia by sending tanks, troops and war-planes across the border.

More than a thousand civilians were reported to have been killed and large parts of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, were reduced to ruins as a conflict with potentially global repercussions erupted after months of rising tension. Georgia announced last night that it was withdrawing half of its 2,000 troops from Iraq as it ordered an all-out military mobilisation.

The country is the West’s strongest ally in the region, one of the staunchest supporters of America’s War on Terror and a vital conduit for Western oil and gas supplies from Central Asia.

“We have Russian tanks moving in. We have continuous Russian bombardment,” President Saakashvili declared as he appealed for international support. “Russia is fighting a war with us in our own territory.”

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This battle will have major repercussions well beyond this volatile region

Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor

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The United States, the European Union and Nato appealed for an immediate end to the fighting and for the crisis to be resolved through direct talks. President Bush pledged US support for Georgia’s territorial integrity after holding talks with Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, in Beijing where both men were attending the opening of the Olympic Games.

After a week of skirmishes with separatist militias, Georgian forces began an offensive on Thursday night to seize control of South Ossetia, which broke away in a civil war in the early 1990s and has since sought closer links with Russia.

Russia responded by sending units of its 58th Army, including tanks and hundreds of troops, into South Ossetia while its aircraft reportedly attacked military targets in Georgia itself.

Eduard Kokoity, the leader of South Ossetia’s self-styled government, said that more than 1,400 people had died in the Georgian offensive. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that hospitals were overflowing. Reporters saw trucks bringing wounded Georgian soldiers out of South Ossetia to a military hospital in Gori.

Russia said that at least ten of its peacekeepers in South Ossetia had been killed and another thirty wounded. Georgia claimed to have shot down five Russian jets. Mr Saakashvili told CNN: “It’s like the attack into Afghanistan in 1979. It’s like Czechoslovakia when the Soviet tanks rolled in. If they get away with this in Georgia, the world will be in trouble.”

South Ossetia is little bigger than Luxembourg. but an all-out war would have global repercussions and could leave Russia with a stranglehold on Central Asia’s vast oil and gas supplies. Analysts said that Georgia’s bid for Nato membership, to be discussed at a summit in December, would be complicated greatly by continuing hostilities with Russia. If an increasingly assertive Kremlin succeeds in imposing its will on its tiny neighbour, it might be encouraged to do the same elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

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