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.