Auguste Venslauskaite is well-acquainted with Russia, having heard the rattle of machine guns, the explosions of bombs and the sonic booms of jet planes. This clamor, when Vladimir Putin's troops engage in maneuvers, reminds the little girl and the residents of her town that a hostile army lurks just across the Liepona River, the traditional border between this part of Lithuania and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Auguste (pronounced Augusté) is 7 years old. We meet her, along with her parents and maternal grandparents, in Kybartai, where its 4,500 residents live close to this extension of the Russian Federation in the heart of Europe.

Russia, for them, is behind the fences and cameras along the border, in that no man's land of wild grass, shrubs and a few buildings in the distance, including a ruin: the Lutheran Church of Eydtkuhnen (now Chernyshevskoye), a vestige of the time when the enclave was part of East Prussia, before being annexed by Joseph Stalin in 1945 and becoming a Soviet, then Russian, oblast – a region. This piece of Russia is visible from everywhere in Kybartai. Around a street corner, at the end of a garden, behind the town cemetery.

The shooting range where Russian border guards conduct exercises, 500 meters from the border, and the military training center in Dobrovolsk, approximately 8 kilometers further, are not visible. But when you approach the town on a spring day, in this peaceful rural area with its endless fields, ponds and storks busy in their nests, and you hear a detonation, you start to think that Kybartai is not what it seems. Then you talk to the residents and understand that this small outpost, which was also a hub of dissidence during the Soviet occupation, is a microcosm of the anxieties of the continent, haunted by the return of oppression and war.

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