Russia has one desire in relation to Mikheil Saakashvili — to see him removed as President of Georgia and preferably hanged “by the balls”, in Vladimir Putin’s colourful expression.

President Medvedev has set out the Kremlin’s policy just as graphically, calling Mr Saakashvili a “political corpse” who “no longer exists in our eyes”. He told Western analysts that his Georgian counterpart was “mentally unstable”.

The rhetoric has been unrelentingly harsh since last August’s war over South Ossetia.

General Nikolai Makarov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, claimed last week that Georgia was rearming to try to reclaim South Ossetia and its other lost region of Abkhazia by force.

Georgia denies this but it suits Russia to cast Mr Saakashvili as an aggressor once more.

Russian diplomats have been working to strip the conflict zone of international observers. A UN observer mission ended in Abkhazia last week after 16 years when Russia vetoed the renewal of its mandate.

Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe are due to leave Georgia next week after Russia blocked the extension of their mission. EU observers remain but Russia refuses to let them into Abkhazia or South Ossetia.

Tensions are high. The South Ossetian area at Akhalgori is particularly unstable and could easily become the spark for a wider conflagration.

The Russian Army was 20 miles (30km) from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, when energetic diplomacy by President Sarkozy of France prevented Mr Putin from carrying out his threat. But Moscow remains in breach of its ceasefire commitments by failing to withdraw from Akhalgori, which was formerly in Georgia.

The lesson the Kremlin drew from the war was that European and American outrage was shortlived and not accompanied by any serious sanctions. The West looked weak.

The military exercises end on July 6, the day President Obama arrives in Moscow in his drive to press the “reset” button in relations with Russia. It would seem insane to start a new war in Georgia that effectively torpedoed that initiative.

But hardline elements in Russia’s siloviki, or power structures, might spy an opportunity for a double whammy — to depose Mr Saakashvili and humiliate Mr Obama by demonstrating the folly of US support for Georgian aspirations to join Nato.

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