later, the entire region splintered along its complex ethnic lines.

How is Georgia divided?

The North Caucasus is a crazy quilt of Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians, Abkhazis, Ajars, Dagestanis, Kubans (not to be confused with Kabarians), Mingrelians and Svanetians, and that's before you get to better-known nationalities like Azeris, Georgians and Armenians. According to the Foreign Office, about 70 per cent of Georgia's 4.5 million citizens are ethnic Georgians. Of the country's minorities, several have their own enclaves: the Armenians and Ajars in the south, and the two groups at the heart of the current conflict, the Ossetians and Abkhazis. Abkhazia, lying on Georgia's Black Sea coast, has never resolved its differences with Tbilisi since the two sides failed to agree on a constitution in 1925.

And what of the Ossetians?

A people divided by the border drawn between Russia and Georgia in 1922, they claim to be descended from the Samartians – nomads who rolled into Europe from modern-day Iran in the seventh and eighth centuries and then retreated to the gorges of the Caucasus. Today they number around 600,000, 75 per cent of whom live in the autonomous region of North Ossetia in Russia. The remainder live in South Ossetia, in Georgia. To give an idea of the complexity of the region: the Ossetians between them have three languages and two religions, Christianity and Islam, and the Georgians are not their only enemy. Brutally treated under the USSR, they are frequently at odds with the Ingushetians and Chechens to their east. The Beslan school siege of 2004, in which 331 people died, occurred in North Ossetia and was widely interpreted as a Chechen attack on the Ossetian people.

What happened under Soviet rule?

Like the rest of the Caucasus, Georgia was forcibly assimilated into the USSR during the civil war of 1918 to 1921. The borders of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic were later drawn up by its most famous son: Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin, who was born in Gori, the strategic town in the present war. Over the next 70 years, the region's ethnic and religious differences were ignored or brutally dealt with. In 1944, for instance, Stalin deported 400,000 Chechens and Ingushetians to Central Asia for their perceived disloyalty. Georgian uprisings took place in 1924 and 1956 and were bloodily suppressed each time. When independence finally came, in 1991, the circumstances echoed those in 1918: freed from a weakened Moscow, Georgians had a fierce national identity to assert, but so did everyone else.

And were Georgia's leaders prepared to negotiate?

No. Georgia's first post-Soviet leader was Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a literary scholar known for his translations of Shakespeare, TS Eliot, and his work on the 12th century Georgian epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin. His erratic government lasted seven months, but it was long enough to set Georgia on a path against its separatists. In 1992, his more stable successor, the ex-Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, adopted a policy of "Georgia for the Georgians" and launched attacks on both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. More than 1,000 died in brutal, gorge-to-gorge fighting that ended in ceasefi res in both regions, but which were to be monitored by Russian peacekeepers.

Where did that leave Georgia?

The nationalist cause was subdued as Georgia stagnated and suffered during the financial crisis that hit Russia in the late 1990s. Then, in late 2003, came the Rose Revolution, which launched the young Western-educated lawyer, Mikheil Saakashvili, as Georgia's saviour. The problem was that he found himself up against a Kremlin no longer distracted and weak. The circle of power had turned again. As Shevardnadze once said: "The destiny of Russia is reflected in the Caucasus like the rays of the sun are reflected in a drop of water."

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