For a President facing political crisis, with Russian troops dug into Georgian soil and daily street protests calling for his head, Mikheil Saakashvili certainly put on a bombastic show for the visiting press.

His performance as he visited vineyards, promising subsidies and equipment, and posed with tourists in this medieval fortress town, combined the casual charm of Barack Obama with good old fashioned Soviet-style propaganda.

When we finally sat face to face across a table laid out with a Georgian feast, Mr Saakashvili hissed defiance at critics who accuse him of pursuing a disastrous war with Russia. “This is Georgian territory and this is bulls**t that we started war in our territory! We didn’t attack Russia. We didn’t go there and bomb Moscow,” Mr Saakashvili told The Times.

His bonhomie slipped in a flash of real anger, a glimpse of the emotional side that critics say led to war. Next month an international commission will report on the causes of the conflict.

He says: “If there are idiots who say we started the war, they are wrong.” He said that he would never resign over his conduct.

The US-trained lawyer who led the Rose Revolution accused the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, of invading Georgia in a failed attempt to seize vital pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to Europe.

Despite the presence of Russian troops “occupying” the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both unilaterally recognised as independent states by the Kremlin, Mr Saakashvili’s ambition of taking Georgia into Nato “is realistic”, he said.

Russia, he claimed, had made a brazen grab for the pipelines running through Georgia from the Caspian Sea to the West. Taking over the whole of Georgia was vital to Mr Putin’s plan. “He saw it in terms of geopolitical competition with the West.”

Mr Saakashvili recounted telephone conversations with the former US Administration when war broke out last August. “Condoleezza Rice called me and told me the Russians want full annihilation of Georgia. I said, ‘Thank you, Condi, do you have anything else to tell me?’.”

But President George Bush, with whom Mr Saakashvili enjoyed close personal ties, intervened. “Five days later George Bush said, ‘We will not allow them to enter Tbilisi’.

Half an hour after that statement the Russians backed down.” The thousands of Russian troops still stationed in South Ossetia are, he said, only 10km from the main pipeline that carries 1 per cent of the world’s daily oil output from East to West.

Border guards are tightening checkpoints and some troops remain on Georgian soil in breach of an international ceasefire agreement. “They want to do Checkpoint Charlie in my own country, exactly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

European Union monitors now play a key role in ensuring peace. One day Mr Saakashvili may yet realise his dream of seeing Georgia join the EU, even if he conceded that he would no longer be President by then. “We are not going to get EU accession any time soon.”

Yet Mr Saakashvili sees Georgia’s future forever tied to the West. He was the third-biggest contributor of troops to another controversial war, in Iraq. “The whole perception that America is getting weaker or the West is getting weaker does not make things easier for us,” he said.

Times Recommends

• UN may halt 400-year-old 'freedom of the seas'
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone
• Gas deal on hold, but Ukraine may pay in the end