Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the military insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern provinces triggered political and academic debates on various issues related to post-Soviet borderlands,1 above all those populated by Russian-speakers and culturally gravitating towards Russia. In this context the Estonian city of Narva became one of the hottest nodal points in heated international discussions over the prospects and possible modalities of a new Cold War between Russia and the West. In political parlance, Narva became a metaphor with an explicit conflictual semantics, yet what exactly stands behind this metaphor, and through the prism of what academic concepts can it be unpacked?