TBILISI: It would be a stretch to say Mikheil Saakashvili has been humbled. But almost a year after Georgia's war with Russia, the flamboyant president, like his country, cuts a more modest figure.

The five-day war dashed the former Soviet republic's hopes of taking back control of the rebel regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and slammed the brakes on NATO accession.

With his greatest ambitions curtailed, Saakashvili is now under pressure at home and abroad to build the kind of democracy he promised with the "Rose Revolution" that swept him to power in 2003.