Is this where world war three starts?

You can tell quite a bit about a place by the number of national flags on display. One or two on public buildings here and there is a healthy genuflection to a moderate and comfortable patriotism. But groups of the same national flag every five paces, on every building and festooning the parks and boulevards – well, there’s something going on, isn’t there? You’re in a place where trouble is surely just around the corner, a place where the national authorities may not feel entirely secure. What sort of trouble? Well, one wouldn’t want to be over-dramatic, obvs, but in this particular case, world war three.

This is Daugavpils, in the far south-east corner of Latvia, only a well-directed gobbet of phlegm from the Belarus border and about 75 miles from the Russian frontier. It is a Russian town, by which I mean that its population is some 75 per cent Russian – or 48 per cent if you believe the official Latvian statistics, which nobody does.

In 2016 the BBC staged a mock world war three for the mass entertainment of its viewers and the whole shebang kicked off right here. In this fiction, the mayor of Daugavpils declared independence from Latvia and the state authorities sent in the police and troops to quell the local fervour for revolt, which had perhaps been exacerbated by Russian agents from across the border. Reacting to the perceived subjugation of the Russki majority in this town, Vladimir Putin sent in the troops as a supposedly protective and defensive gesture. Latvia is of course a member of Nato, and western troops were thus compelled to respond. Within a surprisingly short space of time the entire Baltic states – and shortly afterwards the rest of the world – were glowing like a Belisha beacon.