The Georgians are the Irish of the Caucasus. They are proud, high-minded, independent, prone to take offence, and when in a scrap they generally give as good as they get.

Most of the time they think of themselves as poets and natural aristocrats: speak to any taxi driver in downtown Tbilisi and the odds are that before the journey is over he’ll have you know that he’s the son of a prince or archduke or some such blueblood.

And just as the Irish regard their neighbours on the other side of the Sea of Moyle with a fair degree of suspicion and exasperated goodwill, so too do the Georgians look on Moscow as a geographical and historical fact that has to be endured rather than relished.

So when the Georgian authorities took it into their heads last week to arrest four Russian military officers on suspicion of espionage, it was obvious that a punch-up was in the offing. Diplomats and their families were flown back to Russia, in garrisons up and down the country Russian troops have been placed on a high level of alert, additional troops have been moved to the border areas and the Russian Black Sea fleet is due to start manoeuvres this week – all moves which have inconvenienced and angered the Georgians.

And there’s more. Russia is due to pull its forces out of Georgia by the end of 2008 but that may not happen now, after general Andrei Popov, the local commander, announced the arrest of his officers had thrown the timetable into doubt.

As ever in this neck of the woods, there is a subtext to these slightly hysterical shenanigans. Russian president Vladimir Putin has little love for the Georgians and he is none too keen on their government, which brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power following the so-called “rose revolution” in 2003.

One of the first pronouncements of the new regime was destined to cause trouble, and it did. From the outset Saakashvili made it clear that he was going to be nobody’s poodle; instead he would take his country out of Russia’s orbit and restore the sturdy independence which it had enjoyed in the past.

Not only that, but he proceeded to embrace the free-market economy and announced that he would be applying for membership of Nato for Georgia.

Nothing is more likely to enrage Putin than the thought of the transatlantic alliance ending up on his doorstep. Although he realises that it is perhaps inevitable – and he himself already has entered into a partnership with his former enemies – he just does not like the concept of Europe getting a toehold beyond the Caucasus. In his mind this is Russia’s sphere of influence, and just as the US promoted the Monroe Doctrine to protect their interests in the Americas in the 19th century, so too does Putin want to keep his own backyard in Russian hands.

That’s all well and good, and Nato is sensitive to the upset caused by its move eastwards, but there is another factor which muddies the relationship between Russia and Georgia: the unresolved crisis in the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Moscow maintains close links with the separatist regimes.

For the Georgians this is regarded as an insult to their integrity; for the Russians it is a case of looking after their own. Both think they are right and both will be determined to stand up for themselves, tiny Georgia against gigantic Mother Russia.

Cool heads will be needed to stop this drama becoming a full-blown crisis, and, to be honest, there’s not many of those down Tbilisi way.