ESTONIAN-RUSSIAN BORDER -- When Nikolai Vosunurm gets up in the morning, he crawls out of bed in Estonia and walks to Russia to use his outhouse.


"What can I do?" shrugged the shy, 49-year-old farmer, who unwittingly finds himself in the middle of a border dispute between the two former Soviet republics.


His one-room log cabin straddles the border. If he takes a wrong step coming out of his outhouse, he'll fall headlong into a freshly dug ditch, part of recent Russian efforts to build a full-scale border.


The work, which also includes cutting down forests, laying barbed wire and planting posts along 250 kilometers (150 miles) of border, has infuriated Estonians, who say the line cuts into their land.


Caught in the middle are those along the border like Vosunurm. Scores of farms have been sliced in half, parishioners have been cut off from their churches, and families have been separated."When the border is finished, an Estonian who lives on this side will have to travel 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the Russian Embassy in Tallinn just to visit his grandmother two kilometers away," said Vello Lovi, a local official on the Estonian side of the border.


In his log cabin in the village of Saatse, eight miles northeast of Petseri, Vosunurm recalls how two Russian border guards recently knocked on his door, demanded his passport and asked whether he was Russian or Estonian.


"I told them I was Estonian and that I wanted to stay in Estonia," Vosunurm said, petting his cat on the Estonian side of his room, then crossing over to stoke a roaring fire on the Russian side.


Armed Russian troops are expected to begin making regular patrols, and his potato field will soon be cut off by a barbed-wire fence. And since his home is in a kind of no man's land, he's been told by Russian authorities that his cabin is subject to demolition.


"They haven't bulldozed my house yet. But what happens next, I really don't know."