Into South Ossetia with dull-eyed Alik

It's all been a bit of a surreal blur since I arrived in Gori on Saturday afternoon, just in time to see the horrific results of Russian bombing. Was Moscow really dropping bombs on apartment blocks in another country?

When Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, suggested this could happen at an interview a couple of months ago I laughed at him - ­ it seemed absurd. Now here was a Georgian woman weeping over her dead son as the apartment block behind her smouldered in the aftermath of a Russian bombing attack.

The real horror came on Sunday, though. A colleague and I decided to get as far as we could towards the border with South Ossetia, the breakaway province at the conflict's centre.

Anyone who had travelled north from Gori in the morning had reported sniper fire and gun battles, and we vowed to turn back at the

first sign of trouble. But there was none. So we drove, and drove, right up to the abandoned Georgian checkpoint at the de facto border.

A small puppy paced terrified around the inside of a blackened hut; a calendar emblazoned with a photograph of a youthful Saakashvili hung forlornly on the wall. All around was eerie silence.

We decided to move further, towards the Russian checkpoint. As we approached it, we could see Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, below us in the valley, plumes of smoke rising from its shattered centre. We planned to ask about the situation and then turn back.

But the Russian checkpoint turned out to be an Ossetian post manned by a ramshackle band of Ossetian paramilitaries who looked like the bad guys out of a Russian B-movie about the Chechen war - ­ bearded, toothless men wielding their weapons with glee and barking orders at us in heavily accented Russian. The Russians themselves were nowhere to be seen.

All our entreaties to be allowed to return to Gori were turned down, and the Ossetians