TENSIONS over South Ossetia and Abkhazia – two tiny Russian-backed separatist regions in Georgia that have enjoyed de facto independence since soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union – have been rising for months. Western intelligence experts had long been warning that war was likely.

Superficially, the sequence of events is a simple escalation.

Since sweeping to power four years ago on the back of a peaceful popular uprising welcomed by the West, Mikhail Saakashvili, 40, a US-educated lawyer, has pledged to bring the two enclaves back under Georgia’s control.

In April Vladimir Putin, then Russian president, recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as legal entities, drawing Georgian accusations that Moscow was trying to annex the enclaves. In July four Russian military jets violated Georgian airspace, triggering Georgian protests and a threat to shoot down the next Russian warplane.

Last week, each side accused the other of armed provocation in South Ossetia. On Friday Saakashvili ordered an offensive after receiving reports – he said – that the Russian military had neared the border. As Russians routed the Georgians in South Ossetia, Abkhazian rebels said they had begun to drive out the Georgians from a key position in the Black Sea enclave.

There is much more at stake in the fighting than the future of two small breakaway republics, however. A greater conflict is under way.

One key is the recognition earlier this year by Nato and European Union countries of Kosovan independence from Serbia. Russia opposed this; Serbia has long been its client state. However, it tried to turn the defeat to its advantage by pushing the argument that, if Kosovans could be independent, so too could the Abkhazians and Ossetians.

This was a significant development in Russia’s reaction to what it regards as steady western encirclement.

Moscow has repeatedly accused the West of reneging on post-cold-war assurances that there would be no expansion into the vacuum left by the Soviet Union. Not only have former Soviet satellite states in east-central Europe joined Nato, but Georgia and Ukraine – once integral parts of the USSR – are also seeking entry. The Georgian army is being retrained by American military advisers.

Poland and the Czech Republic have agreed to host American missile sites, ostensibly as part of an antiIranian shield. The thought of Ukraine and Georgia doing the same gives Kremlin securocrats nightmares.

In South Ossetia, Russia is drawing a confrontation line in the sand. If Georgia joins Nato, Moscow is saying, there is no way that South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be part of it.

“If Saakashvili thought he was going to take over the region by force without a Russian reaction, he is even more naive than we thought,” said a Kremlin insider. “I’m not quite sure what he had in mind, but the end result is pretty clear as far as we are concerned. Russian tanks in South Ossetia won’t be in any rush to leave.”

Georgia’s young president has taken a gamble that the crisis will make Nato more rather than less likely to welcome him as a partner, and that America will recognise him as a fellow warrior in the worldwide struggle for freedom.

“It’s not about Georgia any more,” Saakashvili said. “It’s about America, its values: we are a freedom-loving nation that is right now under attack.”

He could be wrong: some western Europeans are certainly doubtful and George Bush has not come out with all guns blazing in his support. “[Saakashvili] has had plenty of warnings from the West that it won’t pull any chestnuts out of the fire for him, so I don’t think he can count on the cavalry riding in,” said Fraser Cameron of the EU-Russia Centre in Brussels.

“He is in big danger of losing the cachet he built up for himself in being pro-western and the restraint he has often shown,” said James Nixey of Chatham House, the foreign policy think tank, in London. “If he is going to start a war, he is going to lose the support of a lot of friends in the West.”

Saakashvili knows full well, however, that his country is of great economic importance to western Europe because of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which runs through central Georgia south of the breakaway region.

Although it lies hundreds of miles from troubled South Ossetia, the BTC pipeline is flanked by key Georgian military installations that were among the first targets attacked by Russian jets as the conflict erupted late last week.

Young presidents at war

The war has pitted against each other two inexperienced young presidents, both of them lawyers.

Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, 40, is an ardent supporter of George W Bush and has several framed photos of them together. Educated at Columbia and George Washington universities, he was justice minister in the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister who became Georgia’s president after the USSR collapsed.

He turned against his patron, and succeeded him after the nonviolent Rose revolution in 2003. He has not found ruling the volatile country easy; critics accused him of autocratic tendencies last year after a crackdown on the opposition. Saakashvili is vilified in Russia.

Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, 42, is a mild-mannered bureaucrat elevated by Vladimir Putin earlier this year. A short, dapper figure regarded as weaker and more liberal than his mentor, he needed to demonstrate to powerful clans inside the Kremlin that he, too, could be tough.

While Medvedev has yet to step out of Putin’s shadow, he is the first Russian leader to order troops into a foreign country since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Times Recommends

• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Indian Army spends10m rupees on golf buggies
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating