KEY POINTS:
The European Union will have to overcome major internal differences if it wants to be a strong player in the conflict unfolding between Georgia and Russia.
The 27 European foreign ministers, due to hold an emergency meeting in Brussels tomorrow, will face the EU's biggest security crisis since
the 1999 Kosovo war.
They will face demands for a tough line from eastern EU members who argue Russia's campaign in Georgia aims at regime change and extending Russian influence.
But Western European countries, led by France and Germany, will call for pragmatism.
They suspect Georgia's pro-Western leader, after failing in his gamble to recover a breakaway province, is trying to internationalise the conflict.
But they also fear retaliation against Russia would unleash reprisals on the gas exports on which their economies depend.
The conflict was prompted by Georgia's offensive late last week against Russian-backed separatists in the province of South Ossetia.
Russia, launching its first foreign military campaign since the end of the Soviet Union, has responded with ruthless force, seizing control of South Ossetia and striking at targets across Georgia.
"We must emphasise the presence and the strength of the European Union," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, whose country took the helm of the EU on July 1, told French radio from Tblisi.
Celine Francis, a specialist in the Caucasus at Belgium's VUB university, said: "If the European Union stays firm then Russia will probably be more inclined to listen.
"However, Russia can also manipulate Europe, not least through the direct bilateral ties it has built up with some member states."
Fear and dislike of Russia run deep in the former Soviet satellites, many of which are led by strongly pro-United States and pro-Nato governments.
Poland and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania lashed the "imperialist policy" of Russia and called on the EU to revise its co-operation agreement with Moscow.
Warsaw has also called on the EU to send a stabilisation force to the region, following Russia's response that it was no longer able to act as peacekeeper, a role it took up after the Commonwealth of Independent States brokered a ceasefire in the early 1990s.
In Western Europe, though, a strong sense is that Georgia's pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, overplayed his hand by moving into South Ossetia.
"Of course the sympathy is on the side of the weaker group, for Georgia, especially as it is fighting a country that has caused a lot of suffering to all of its neighbours," said Roman Kuzniar, a professor of political science at the University of Warsaw.
"But realistic analysis shows the Georgians made a big mistake. Now Georgia will have to take the toll."
France and Germany, with others, blocked Georgia's bid to gain candidate status for Nato, a stepping stone to full membership of the alliance, at a summit in Bucharest in April.
US President George W. Bush had championed Georgia's candidacy, but Germany publicly argued that such a move was premature, given the unresolved conflict over South Ossetia.
The onus of stopping the violence has shifted to the EU in the light of Bush's moderate response to Saakashvili's appeals to end what Georgia called Stalinesque bullying of a tiny state.
