Alzbeta Ehrnhofer was a young schoolgirl when the Soviet Army poured into Czechoslovakia to "restore order" in 1968.
The unfolding crisis in Crimea took her back to the day almost 46 years ago when tanks rumbled past her house in the southern Slovak town of Filakovo as neighbours hid from the Russian-led invaders.
"It's just like it was here in 1968," she said about the upheaval in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic undergoing its second revolution as an independent nation.
"Nothing's changed. Even the tanks look the same."
As Ukrainians steel themselves against a full invasion by Russian troops into Crimea and political leaders engage in diplomacy with President Vladimir Putin to remove soldiers and sailors already there, people in central and eastern Europe say their mistrust of Russia is as strong as it has ever been.
Czechs and Slovaks, who split in 1993, "still remember the Russian invasion of 1968", Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said.
"We all believed that Russia had joined the ranks of civilised countries, so this is a very rude awakening to see that even now a country with defined borders can have its territory violated."
Twenty-five years ago, countries from Estonia to Romania began breaking from Russia in favour of market economies.
"This evokes memories we'd hoped had been put to rest," said Eugeniusz Smolar, a Warsaw- based foreign policy expert.
"Our own feelings of abandonment translate into our feelings about Ukraine at moment."
