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Convoy Kouchner was quite literally chaos on wheels. A high-speed chase through what was the Russian buffer zone between Georgia and South Ossetia.

The French foreign minister, who helped negotiate the ceasefire during the war, was out in front in a blue French armoured car, followed by another such vehicle, and then a train of police cars and in their wake a ragtag and bobtail of local and international journalists, gunning their engines trying to keep up.

The armoured car would stop, sometimes for hardly more than a minute, Georgian police would jump out, lining the route, pointing their sub-machine guns into the middle distance, cameramen and reporters screeched to a halt and ran up to the head of the convoy, just in time to take a couple of pictures as rather bewildered locals coming the other way tried to drive through the mass of abandoned vehicles.

After grabbing a couple of pictures of the minister saying something wise, everyone ran back to their cars and the convoy then moved off again, amid much honking and hooting, losing stragglers at each stop.

At one village, where Mr Kouchner stopped for about quarter of an hour, he spoke to a woman whose house had been blown up at the beginning of the war. He stood and chatted with her in front of the shell of her home, its roof blown off, twisted metal and glass crunching under our feet. Mr Kouchner later said it was "very sad, but not hell".

Perhaps a woman we spoke to in the village might not agree. She told us that she had just come back to visit her house and it was all in ruins, so she would be returning to the refugee camp in Gori. She said she only just managed to escape the bombs, and many of her neighbours were killed then and afterwards. She'd got ill living in the camp and was worried that as she was all alone she had no one to help her out. As she put it, "there is no one to bring me a glass of water if I call out from my bed".

Mr Kouchner was not trying to be insensitive, but is proud of the peace deal negotiated on behalf of the European Union. He described it as "not perfect, but a document negotiated under fire". He said it had stopped the Russians rolling on to take the capital Tbilisi.

But what bothers the Georgian government is that they say the Russians have kept land taken in the war, particularly the area of Akhalgori, an area of 26 villages next to, or in, South Ossetia, depending on your point of view. Mr Kouchner's convoy must have passed the turn-off on their way back to the capital, but did not go to investigate.

Whatever you call the area, the Russians weren't there before the war, and are now. No one seems to dispute that. So it is logical to see it as a breach of the ceasefire which states they must move troops back to where they were before the conflict began.

Mr Kouchner didn't suggest this logic was wrong, but didn't seem too bothered about this breach. He said the ceasefire was "not complete, not perfect". When I pressed him he said: "Did you listen for the noise of shots? Is the withdrawal complete? Yes, yes" - and pulled a face. He said that this and other problems would be a question for a conference that starts in Geneva next week.

Another journalist had a go, asking how he could say that the ceasefire had not been breached. "Do you have another solution?" he asked. "Step by step we'll do it."

Mr Kouchner has a habit of asking questioners what they would do and many European diplomats agree with him that there's no point in being purist about this.

One very senior European diplomat told me they were in for the long haul and the peace process is likely to last as long as that to solve the status of Kosovo. Many in the EU think the status quo is the best they will get and better than they could have hoped for in August.

As the senior diplomat put it, "time to take the money and run".

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