The Russian soldiers swooped out of the sky in helicopters, swiftly seizing control of a mountain village that had been inhabited by Georgians for centuries.
Within a week, the Georgian villagers were forced to flee. "It was impossible to stay there," said Koba Chincharauli, a grizzled 68-year-old cattle farmer.
"The Russians were training there, shooting and bombing. They took our cattle barns. They invaded my garden. It was so noisy, our horses ran away."
The village of Pichvni was captured by 50 heavily armed Russian border troops in mid-February, but the incident was kept quiet until this month. Georgian leaders, facing a domestic election, were reluctant to admit the loss of the village. And they hesitated to fuel the rising tensions with their powerful neighbour -- even though they considered the Russian military action to be an illegal and hostile move.
Georgian authorities planned to protest against the incident at a special border commission meeting last week in Moscow. But at the last minute, the Kremlin cancelled the meeting. Many observers are worried that the Russian capture of Pichvni could be a harbinger of international clashes in this powder-keg region around the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains.
With a brutal war still raging between Russian and Chechen fighters in the North Caucasus, there are mounting fears that the conflict could spill over into neighbouring Georgia or other countries in the region. The capture of Pichvni shows that the spillover is already beginning.
Georgian military and diplomatic officials are convinced that Russia is exploiting the Chechnya conflict to destabilize and intimidate Georgia, weakening the independence of this small ex-Soviet republic strategically located near the Asian-European crossroads and the oil wealth of the Caspian Sea.
The Russian seizure of Pichvni is "one of their weapons of pressure against Georgia," said Lieutenant-General Valery Chkheidze, chief of Georgia's 5,000-member border-guard force.
"It was a provocation," he said. "Their aim is to cause the destabilization of Georgia and to make Georgia dependent on Russia. They want to involve Georgia in their war."
The Kremlin's pressure on Georgia has intensified sharply in the months since the latest Chechnya war erupted last year. Moscow has accused Georgia of allowing rebel fighters and mercenaries to travel through Georgia to enter Chechnya. It has threatened to impose visa restrictions on Georgians entering Russia -- a potentially crippling blow to the Georgian economy. And some Russian officials are threatening to postpone the closing of its military bases in Georgia, despite the Kremlin's earlier promise to close two of the four bases.
According to Georgian officials, Russian warplanes have violated Georgian airspace at least 50 times since the war began. In three separate incidents, Russian planes or helicopters have dropped bombs on Georgian territory.
Russia seized the village of Pichvni on Feb. 14 in an effort to seal its southern border and tighten the noose around the Chechen separatist rebels, whose traditional strongholds are in Chechnya's southern mountains.
When Georgia complained about the capture, the Kremlin produced a map from 1972 that showed Pichvni on the Russian side of the border.
Georgia has produced its own map, from 1928, showing the village on Georgian territory. But the border has never been officially demarcated, and the Georgians acknowledge that it is difficult to prove their case. The internal borders in most Soviet maps were vaguely drawn. The only detailed maps were military maps, and these were highly secret.
"The Soviet administrative borders were often changed overnight at whim," said Gela Charkviani, head of foreign affairs in the Georgian President's office. "Today those whims are like land mines that can explode."
Mr. Chincharauli, the farmer who was forced to flee from Pichvni, has no doubts that the village is Georgian. Every year, in early October, he drives his 80 head of cattle from the Georgian medieval fortress village of Shatili to his winter barns in Pichvni, about six kilometres away.
"My father and grandfather had always lived there in the winter," he said. "You can see historical places there where our great-grandfathers lived and worked. It was always Georgian. How could it belong to Russia? We never thought anyone could take it from Georgia, but now they've taken it. It was an invasion."
Mr. Chincharauli and several other farmers had to abandon their winter hay supplies and drive their cattle back to Shatili, where the animals nearly died of starvation while the farmers tried desperately to borrow hay from neighbours.
"The whole year we worked to gather hay for our cattle, but we had to leave everything behind -- our winter clothes, our beds, our plates, our cattle feed," Mr. Chincharauli said.
"The Russians took what they wanted, even our roofs and our wheat. When we went to our pastures, the Russians stopped us and questioned us and ordered us to show our documents. They were very rude. We meant nothing to them."
He has given up any hope of returning to the village, where Russian soldiers are now sleeping in his house. "It's too dangerous," he said. "There are rumours that you can't take one or two steps without hitting a land mine."
But he doesn't feel safe in Shatili either. Russian warplanes dropped bombs on a Georgian border post at Shatili in the winter, injuring several border guards and civilians, and some Georgians predict that more Russian bombs will fall soon.
When the capture of Pichvni became known this month, dozens of Georgians held an angry protest rally at the Russian embassy in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. The official Georgian reaction, however, was surprisingly restrained.
"Everyone is afraid to provoke Russia," said Ramaz Klimiashvili, a political scientist in Tbilisi. "The Russians are just waiting for a provocation to move their troops inside Georgia."
The Kremlin intensified its pressure campaign against Georgia when Tbilisi refused to allow Russia to deploy troops and supplies from its Georgian military bases into Chechnya to reinforce the Russian war effort. It also wanted to deploy its troops on the Georgian side of the border to tighten its control there, but again it failed to get Tbilisi's permission.
Tensions may grow in the coming weeks when mountain passes between Georgia and Chechnya become open. The Georgians say it will be impossible to prevent small groups of Chechen rebels from slipping across the border.
Geoffrey York