Seventy-year-old Lia Chlachidze's village of Ergneti lies metres from a Russian checkpoint along the boundary of South Ossetia, a separatist region controlled by Moscow since it invaded in 2008. "Danger lurks every minute," she tells AFP. "Life here is like sitting on a powder keg." Since routing Georgia's small army, the Russian military has been building barbwire fences along the line of separation between the enclave and the rest of Georgia, to transform the line into a "state border." Tensions heightened once again in early November when the Georgian government said that Russian troops had killed a 58-year-old Georgian civilian who had gone to pray in a church into which they had previously denied Georgians access earlier this year. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES