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Mikheil Saakashvili today launched a broadside against Zurab Noghaideli, leader of the Movement for a Fair Georgia and in the process appeared to admit that earlier smears from him and his regime and its media clients against opposition leaders Levan Gachechiladze and Nino Burjanadze were tools of the Kremlin were groundless.

In attacking Noghaideli, who served as Saakashvili's prime minister for over two years, this week travelled to Moscow to sign a deal with Vladimir Putin's United Russia, the Georgian president stated: "The fact that the Kremlin has nobody to depend on except Zurab Noghaideli and pays $50 million to Nauru for recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia means that we are not in a very catastrophic state."

In July Saakashvili explicitly accused Gachechiladze and Burjanadze of "begging" for Russian money - a claim which his latest remarks would seem to show was groundless.

As always the president is being less than candid about his own relationship with Russia: for instance it is widely acknowledged that it was the Russians who decided that Saakashvili and not Burjanadze who became president after the Rose Revolution.