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Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, tonight continued his recent campaign of bellicose rhetoric with a speech (pictured as covered by Imedi) in which he said, in a clear reference to Russia, "the best way to deal with a bear is to take a stick and hit it on its head, or it is even better if you have a pistol or a large caliber gun. So, these are elementary rules for existence of the statehood."

In the last two months Saakashvili has called for every Georgian, of all ages, to be ready to fight "the enemy" and has said that Georgian school children will face compulsory "military-patriotic" teaching from the start of the new school year in September.

But while the defence minister Bacho Akhalaia said that these classes would include learning how to handle a gun, the education minister, Dimitry Shaskin later said the emphasis would be on safety, such as road crossing, and civil defence, such as learning to steer clear of unexploded cluster bombs.

Tonight Saakashvili rounded on his critics and appeared to suggest both Akhalaia and Shaskin were correct: "We decided to introduce military-patriotic education [in schools] – although it may be called civil defense courses. So called liberals stirred noise about it, saying: ‘what a disaster it is; it’s a bad tone’. By the way, Soviet-time military courses at schools were not really good, " he is quoted by Civil.ge as saying.

He then said the classes should include preparation for missile strikes before adding "Unfortunately, we do not live in Switzerland and Holland and there is one unfriendly country in our neighbourhood. So, Georgia needs all these [classes] and there is nothing militaristic in it… Georgia needs to defend itself. We do not attack anyone. But 20% of our territory is occupied."