TBILISI (Reuters) -- Bonfires blazed in Georgia to mark the first anniversary on Friday of the former Soviet republic's five-day war with Russia over breakaway South Ossetia, where the risk of renewed hostilities remains.

Georgian forces launched an assault on South Ossetia late on August 7 after days of clashes with separatists and years of escalating tension with Moscow, drawing a devastating Russian counter-strike that ended on August 12.
The war killed at least 390 civilians and at its height displaced more than 100,000. A year on, an unfulfilled ceasefire pact, sporadic gunfire and the withdrawal of monitors from pro-Western Georgia's two rebel regions keep alive the risk of renewed war.
Midnight bonfires in the Georgian capital and other towns marked the first in a series of competing ceremonies on Friday in the South Caucasus country and rebel South Ossetia.
Russia blamed the “aggression” of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his U.S.-trained army, and said it fought to defend Russian peacekeepers and civilians holding Russian passports.
Georgia said Russia had already invaded when it launched the assault on South Ossetia, a charge Moscow dismissed as absurd. The invasion, Georgia said, was years in the making by its old Soviet master, punishment for seeking membership of NATO.
“Separatism was just a weapon in Russian hands against Georgian statehood,” Georgian State Minister for Re-Integration Temur Iakobashvili said.
The war rattled Western confidence in oil and gas routes running through Georgia and skirting South Ossetia, which like the rebel Black Sea region of Abkhazia threw off Georgian rule in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“I am confident the world will someday understand that the greatest promise for stability and peace in our region is acceptance of South Ossetia's independence,” the region's self-styled president Eduard Kokoity said in a statement.
Concentrated in the North Caucasus following annual military exercises, Russian tanks rolled over the border and advanced into Georgia proper, routing the Georgian military. Jets bombed from clear summer skies.
Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali was indiscriminate, rights groups said, and militias followed in the wake of the Russian advance, looting and burning ethnic Georgian villages. Some 30,000 mainly ethnic Georgians remain displaced.
The West condemned Russia's counter-strike as “disproportionate,” and the European Union secured a ceasefire.
Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states backed by thousands of Russian troops, despite the ceasefire requiring all sides to pull back to pre-war positions.
The EU and NATO froze talks with energy giant Russia, but a year later they are back on. President Barack Obama is seeking to “reset” relations with Moscow to secure cooperation on issues from arms control to the worsening war in Afghanistan.
Russia, arguing the case for sovereignty for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, has blocked the continuation of OSCE and UN monitoring missions. The EU is alone with 240 monitors deployed after the war, but who are denied access to either rebel region.