Outside Gori, newly vulnerable Georgians flee Russian bombs

Panicked people pressed the gas pedal to the floor and roared toward the capital city of Tbilisi, trying to outrun the explosions. Russian helicopters hung low over the foothills. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had said that the "operation to force the Georgian authorities to peace" was finished. But here in Georgia, the war dragged on.

"They want to destroy us," groaned Aftondil Huroshvili, who begged for a drink of water in a crowded hospital ward in Tbilisi.

The retired topographer had been strolling through Gori's central square when Russia bombed the post office. Shrapnel from the blast shattered his lower leg.

"They want to invade and take everything," he said, rolling his balding head back and forth in pain. "Why are they doing this?"

As a battered country waited Tuesday to see whether a cease-fire would come to fruition, it was clear that Russia had made its point. It took just five days of war to deal a shattering blow to Georgia's collective psyche. People who had begun tarted to divorce themselves from the ominous Soviet-era sense of threat from their massive northern neighbor and who had started to dream of NATO membership and Western-style democracy, have just learned a hard lesson on their own vulnerability.

"We are like an example for the others, that Russia can do the same to anybody," said Nikoloz Kvachatze, a young doctor in Tbilisi's Republic Hospital. "They must be stopped. They won't stop by themselves. They'll start with Georgia and then it will be Poland and Estonia and Ukraine."

Until this week, some Georgians believed that their newly improved armed forces, trained and outfitted with help from the United States, might hold their own against Russia's much larger but aging military. There was a sense that Georgia was moving beyond the reach of Moscow's ire, and would soon find a place among Western states.

Many thought that Georgia's gestures of solidarity, from the troops sent to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq to the street named for President Bush, might induce the United States to back them militarily if they ever found themselves menaced by Russia.