The latest flare-up in the breakaway region of South Ossetia is dominating news bulletins and newspaper front pages in Georgia.

Many Georgian commentators openly accuse the Russian military of siding with separatist forces in South Ossetia with the aim of sharpening tension and provoking a showdown.

The front page of Tbilisi's Alia wonders if President Mikhail Saakashvili can avoid what it calls the latest "Russian-Ossetian bloody provocation".

"The so-called South Ossetian Republic's authorities arranged one more provocation with Russia's help... It is obvious that while Russian political circles are patting Georgia on the back, the Russian military are placing us on a bomb," the paper says .

"[South Ossetian leader Eduard] Kokoiti's war games might end with victims," thunders the headline in Tbilisi's Akhali Versia.

The daily Rezonansi speaks of the "smell of gunpowder" near the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali.

"It is a fact that the Russians, together with the Ossetians are trying to provoke an armed conflict," asserts Mtavari Gazeti.

The two peoples are racing towards an armed conflict like two unguided avalanches Komsomolskaya Pravda

The paper accuses the Russian commander of the mixed peacekeeping force in the territory, General Svyatoslav Nabzdorov, of "intimidating the local Georgians and provoking the Georgian authorities".

It also wonders about the future of the peacekeeping mission in the troubled region.

"It is conspicuous that the OSCE, which monitors peacekeeping activities in the conflict zone, has effectively been left without a function. This makes us think that the peacekeeping mission in the Tskhinvali region has failed," it says.

'Brink of conflict'

Newspapers in Russia are more circumspect in laying blame for the current flare-up, but there is agreement that the situation in the troubled territory has reached a crisis point.

"The South Ossetian crisis has reached the critical point beyond which the shooting starts," says Russian broadsheet Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

Leading daily Izvestiya says Russia and Georgia have "reached the brink of armed conflict" over South Ossetia.

According to Russian army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, the situation in the Georgian-Ossetian conflict zone on Wednesday "worsened, probably as never before, despite the fact that after Mikhail Saakashvili met Vladimir Putin in Moscow he indicated that he was willing to continue the negotiation process".

And for popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, "the situation in the unrecognised republic is hotting up. The two peoples are racing towards an armed conflict like two unguided avalanches."

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.