To say "there is/are" in Russian, do the following:
«есть» is not used, unless the sentence really has to emphasize the existence of the object. Some examples:
In the Present tense no verb is necessary; in the past, you would at least need a form of "to be". Note that even in the present Russian still uses verbs like "is situated", "stands", "lies" way more often than would be considered normal in English.
The most natural translation into English is a structure like "There is an apple on the table" or "An apple is on the table". The emphasis is on the object, not on the place.
Actually, such a sentence answers the question of WHAT is in the said place. For out-of-the-blue sentences about objects that have nothing unique about them it matches what English THERE-IS sentences are for. So this is what we have in this course.
The initial position of a "place" inside the sentence holds for many other structures, too. Whenever the place is not a part of the "message" of your sentence, it is usually somewhere at the beginning (that is, if the place frames your description of an action rather than providing crucial information).
If the whole point of uttering a sentence is telling someone about the place then, naturally, it takes the sentence-final position:
You don't have to translate verbs like "to stand" and "to lie" literally when they refer to objects. Such use is not, by a wide margin, nearly as standard in English as it is in Russian:
In English "to be" is perfectly fine, so we accept that.