Moscow Blast: 'This Is the Security Putin's War Has Brought Us'

"This hit us where it really hurt. Eight dead and 18 wounded in the busiest place in downtown Moscow — it's the equivalent of a bomb in Times Square in New York. And that's left a sense of not quite panic, because people have come to expect this kind of thing, but of dejection. We expect it to happen, but nobody wants to believe it will happen.

"There were some repairs going on in the station and it could be related to that, but it looks a lot more like an act of terror. The logical thought would be that this explosion was related to the anniversary of Putin's war in Chechnya. And this shows how much security the Russian president has brought to his country by waging a bloody and senseless war in which 10,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and countless thousands of Chechens destroyed — and for what?

"We need to think about the framework in which this happens. We cannot just keep waging war. You don't fight terrorism by dropping bombs and rockets from airplanes and strafing villages. If you keep bombarding villages and killing people or turning them into refugees, then you're actually creating the breeding ground for terrorism.

"But the reaction of the government will be that we have not killed enough people, that we have to push on. But it's not the top brass who are affected in attacks like this; it's people like me and my family. A friend of mine was supposed to be in that station at 6 p.m. and I haven't called him. I'm too afraid to call him."