TBILISI (AFP) -- A senior Georgian minister said that war in a Georgian region controlled by Russian-backed separatists had only been avoided thanks to a phone call by France's foreign minister to his Russian counterpart.

The minister for reintegration, Temur Yakobashvili, told AFP that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the height of recent tensions over Abkhazia.
""As a result of that conversation there is no war today in Georgia,"" Yakobashvili said.
Georgia accuses Russia of attempting to annex two areas of the ex-Soviet republic that are controlled by Moscow-backed rebels. Longterm tensions peaked over the last month after Russia tightened links to the separatists.
On Wednesday, Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili lashed out at what he called ""a military intervention"" that challenged international law and was ""not a crisis only for Georgia.""
Yakobashvili did not give any other details of the incident, but told Rustavi-2 television that ""we managed to avoid a very serious provocation due to the intervention of the French foreign minister. Kouchner has personally intervened.""
""The fact that today we live in peace and nothing is happening is also because of him,"" Yakobashvili said.
Over the last month Moscow has tightened formal ties with Georgia's separatist leaderships and sent extra troops to Abkhazia, where they are deployed under a peacekeeping mandate struck after Georgia's central government lost control in the 1990s.
Moscow says the new troops are required to prevent an alleged Georgian plan for a military assault on Abkhazia.
Tbilisi denies preparing war and accuses Moscow of seeking to annex the territories and breaching Georgia's sovereignty in order to keep the country out of NATO.
The tensions have prompted expressions of concern from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday said he hoped the crisis would ease after elections in Georgia on May 21.
""We hope that after the parliamentary elections in Georgia, relations between Russia and Georgia will return to the level of good relations we saw at the start of the year,"" said Steinmeier after meeting with Lavrov in Russia, RIA Novosti reported.
""We are anxious about all of the growing tensions in this region,"" Steinmeier was quoted as saying.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia split from Georgia after armed conflicts in the early 1990s, following Georgia's declaration of independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991.
Russia's FSB security service has caught a Georgian spy in southern Russia who was working to destabilize the region, Russian news agencies quoted intelligence agency sources as saying Friday.
""An agent has been exposed, a Russian citizen, a native of Georgia,"" an unnamed FSB source told Interfax, adding that the capture ""confirms the involvement of Georgian secret services in disruptive terrorist activity in the North Caucasus.""
ITAR-TASS news agency also quoted an FSB source as confirming the capture of the man, aged 34.
The Interfax source said the suspect had been living in the war-torn southern Russian province of Chechnya and had admitted his work for Georgia's secret services.
""In part his work was to organize contacts between Georgian secret services and active members of illegal armed groups on Russian territory,"" the Interfax source said.