What’s horrible about terrorism is the unjust, sudden way it takes perfectly innocent people away. I didn’t know anyone killed in the bombing of the Moscow to St Petersburg Nevsky Express on Friday evening personally. Friends of mine did. Everyone is shaken.

The anniversary this month of the apartment-block bombings that killed nearly 300 people in 1999 has gone by quietly. A memorial service to mark the bomb on Kashirskoye Shosse in Moscow on September 13 won a few column inches and a couple of moments of a TV anchors’ time in the state-run media….

The story around the Arctic Sea is nothing but half-truth, inference and wild, wild speculation. And that’s how the Russian press like it.