With tomorrow marking the first anniversary of the start of Russia and Georgia’s five-day war, the heavyweights in the Western press have been offering one-year-after accountings, mostly variations on what GlobalPost, in an admirably direct headline, terms “Assessing the Russia-Georgia chatter.” A year on, the guns may be largely (if not entirely) silent, but the two countries are marking the anniversary with an escalating  series of verbal skirmishes - some of them depressingly familiar, like the exchange of rhetorical fire in recent weeks over alleged shelling in and around South Ossetia.

In a New York Times guest column today, two American experts who’ve worked with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili say that Tbilisi’s “democratic backsliding” while enjoying virtually uncritical U.S. backing has had as much influence on U.S. standing in the post-Soviet world as Moscow’s bullying. Citing Tbilisi’s “excessive police action against unarmed protesters, problems with the judiciary and efforts to constrain the media,” Mark Lenzi, Georgia country director for the International Republican Institute, and Lincoln Mitchell, who formerly held the same position with the National Democratic Institute, write:

“Soon after Georgia was labeled a ‘beacon of liberty’ to the world by President Bush in 2005, the country started to regress democratically without so much as a peep from Washington. This was not lost on other, more authoritarian governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia that are still dealing with their own fledgling opposition groups.”

Lenzi and Mitchell’s critical assessment is particuarly noteworthy in light of Saakashvili’s recent offer of cabinet posts to members of the opposition (dismissed by some as a PR move timed for U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s recent Georgia visit).

But the most interesting of the anniversary crop might be Marc Champion’s The Wall Street Journal account, which views the war of words through the prism of the pending report on the real fighting by an international fact-finding mission headed by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, a veteran Caucasus hand and former head of the UN observer mission in Abkhazia.

Originally due 31 July, the report has been delayed until late September as both countries, jockeying to influence the verdict, flooded the mission with 11th-hour documents purporting to prove beyond doubt that Georgia launched hostilities to return South Ossetia to its fold or that Russian troops provoked the fighting by pouring into the disputed region.

The collective upshot of reading all this is the sense that we are going to be marking this anniversary in quite the same fashion for many years to come. The Journal’s Champion quotes Kremlin-friendly Russian political analyst Sergei Markov chillingly name-checking the 35-year Mediterranean stand-off that puts the “frozen” in “frozen conflict.”

Moscow isn’t concerned about the virtually unanimous international rejection of Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s postwar declarataions of “independence,” Markov asserts, because “that’s good for Russia. These countries will be tied to Russia, like northern Cyprus is to Turkey.”