With a commanding position overlooking the famous bay of Villefranche, Villa Leopolda dwarfs even the most sumptuous properties on nearby Cap Ferrat.

GEORGIA launches an assault to take back control of the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Russian troops go on a counter-offensive. Moscow announces it recognises the independence of two breakaway Georgian regions.

The international crisis last month in no way interfered, though, with the lifestyles of mega-rich Russian oligarchs who have fast been moving into the French Riviera over the past decade or so.

At the very moment when the Georgia-Russia crisis was at its height, a hitherto anonymous Russian billionaire broke a world record by splashing out £392m. on the Villa Leopolda.

With a commanding position overlooking the famous bay of Villefranche, it dwarfs even the most sumptuous properties on nearby Cap Ferrat, itself the world’s costliest piece of real estate.

Villa Leopolda is set in rolling grounds with more than a thousand orange, lemon and olive trees and was designed and built for  Leopold II, King of the Belgians, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although his father, Leopold I, was Queen Victoria’s favourite uncle, she despised his son, her cousin, as much as his people did: Leopold II was actually booed at his funeral parade.

Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, used to entertain the Queen at his own villa in Villefranche during her winter stays in nearby Nice. And although Lord Salisbury’s property was a mere stone’s throw from Leopold’s, Victoria never called on her reigning cousin. Indeed, on her way from Nice to Villefranche to see her prime minister, she once passed Leopold on the other side of the road with not even an acknowledgement.

Leopold became a huge landowner in Villefranche, Beaulieu and Cap Ferrat and was known for his tough dealing with the French locals. The Villa Leopolda was to become the most imposing property of its time between Nice and Monaco and its superiority has only been confirmed by the price it fetched in August. The £392m. figure dwarfs even the entire personal wealth of the Queen.

Locals say that more than half of all the tourists this year on the French Riviera are rich Russians: the stories doing the rounds on the Cote d’Azur this summer have been almost all about the antics of the oligarchs.

One is said to have been unhappy about the noise the trains make on the coastal line as they run through Beaulieu-sur-Mer – he offered the local authorities £80m. to divert it. They turned him down.

Another wanted to raise the height of the famous Ephrussi Rothschild Villa on Cap Ferrat but was told by the mayor that no building could be higher than the lighthouse. He apparently offered £12m. to have the lighthouse raised.

Yet another had a state-of-the-art surveillance system installed all around his property but not on grounds of security. He simply wanted to be able to watch the flowers growing in his south of France garden while he sat in his Moscow office.

There are tales, too, of party-loving Russians setting light to 500-euro notes and then asking cleaners to sweep up the ashes. One young Russian millionaire is said to have ordered a 1,000-euro bottle of wine, drinking just a single glass from it. Others are hiring Ferraris and Lamborghinis simply to drive along the Promenade des Anglais for an hour.

The superyachts in St Tropez, Cannes and Monaco are increasingly the playthings of Russian billionaires.

There’s nothing new, however, in Russians using the south of France as their playground. A week after the railway line into Nice was opened in 1864, the Emperor Alexander II and his Empress travelled into the city. Other members of the Russian aristocracy began to take up residence, followed by a steady migration of families eager to dodge the harsh winters of their homeland.

Spectacular: the Russian Cathedral in Nice.

The Grand Duchess Helena thought nothing of entertaining more than 5,000 people in the gardens of her villa in Nice. She was also renowned for bathing in the sea throughout the winter months – naked. It was living on a lavish scale that the French had never dreamed of.

Today’s stories of wild Russian behaviour reflect, too, what happened in the  mid-19th century. One Prince Cherkassky, for example, liked to wake up to different flowers in his garden every day. Forty or so gardeners were employed to change them overnight.

The author, Patrick Howarth, in his history of the area, When the Riviera Was Ours, describes how Count Apraxin kept a number of distinguished cellists on permanent duty who were required to play at any time of the day or night. ‘As the music tended to make him feel suicidal, a servant had to stand behind his chair to prevent him from shooting himself,’ wrote Howarth.

Once the crisis had passed, he apparently drank seven or eight brandies and fell asleep.

One of the most spectacular churches in Nice is the exotic Russian cathedral, built under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas II a century ago and the oldest Russian Orthodox one in Europe.

With its onion-shaped domes, pink bricks, icons, frescoes and mosaics, its design is based on St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square. Little wonder that today’s Russian elite attaches such importance and sentimental value to the Cote d’Azur.

Hoteliers and restaurateurs certainly like the colour of Russian money and especially so in a year that’s seen English and American tourists spending less in the face of an impossibly robust euro.

It may have the distinction of attracting the label of ‘the most expensive house in the world’ and, to be sure, it has a fine view over the Mediterranean, but £392m.?

Just put that into some island perspective. Can Villa Leopolda really have a value 78 times greater than Belvedere House in Guernsey ?

It’s truly astonishing that with the same money that’s been splashed out for the villa, you could buy that many Belvederes.

That’s how ‘funny’ Russian money is today in the south of France. And it can’t be right, can it?