Storm warning...

I was two years old when this picture was taken. It shows a Soviet Tu-95 BEAR strategic bomber being intercepted and turned away from UK airspace by an RAF FGR Mk 1 Phantom. Once, this was a regular occurrence; Soviet bombers probed our airspace, and our fighters sought to detect them and drive them off. Pictures such as this showed up often in the newspapers and on TV. The fighter and bomber pilots played it as a game, taking photos of each other and exchanging waves high above the North Sea.

But we all knew that it was no game; that some day those bombers might come blazing in at low level behind a cloud of jamming and fighter escorts, racing to get within missile launch range before the RAF could scramble to shoot them down. There was nothing funny about it; the pilots on both sides were practicing for a war that could have erupted at any moment. That war wouldn't have prompted irate letters in the Telegraph or sanctimonious carping from the Mirror; it would have shattered Europe, east and west alike, and killed millions of her people. It was a huge relief to everyone when, in 1989, the Bears stopped their probes and the RAF fighters stood down. After 45 years, the shadow of World War III had lifted from us.

"Two Tu95 “Bear” bombers were dispatched from their base on the Kola Peninsula in the Arctic Circle and headed towards British airspace.

Russian military aircraft based near the northern port city of Murmansk fly patrols off the Norwegian coast regularly, but the RAF said that it was highly unusual for them to stray as far south as Scotland.

Two Tornado fighters, part of the RAF’s Quick Reaction Alert, took off from RAF Leeming, in Yorkshire, to confront the Russian aircraft, after they were shadowed by two F16s from the Royal Norwegian Air Force, The Times has learnt."

The quote above, unlike the photo, is not from the depths of the Cold War. It's from The Times, on 18 July 2007. The Bear, the iconic animal of Russia, is once more prowling off our shores.

Why? Is it because we've expelled Russian diplomats? Is it because we insist that Russia violates its constitution and hands over to us the alleged killer of a man condemned for treason by his own country - a man who converted to islam out of solidarity with the Chechen murderers? Is it because our NuLabour government insists on sheltering the enemies of a fellow European nation which, like us, has suffered terribly from the evil of islamist terrorism?

Russia is a splendid nation. It and its people have much in common with the UK. They are not our natural enemies unless we choose to make them so. Given the state of the world today we have much to offer each other, and it would be a shame to lose that for the sake of protecting a corrupt oligarch and an islamist terrorist.

Mr Brown, I lived under the threat of a Russian attack for the first half of my life. I was bloody happy when that threat lifted. I know what I said in my previous essay, Red Storm Rising, but this is becoming worryingly real now. I simply do not want to see the Soviet menace rise from the ashes like a huge, malevolent red Phoenix because of some warped obsession with the death of a traitorous terrorist-loving liar.

Forget Litvinenko; extradite Berezovsky; let Russia sort out their own internal security in Chechnya, as they let us do in Northern Ireland.

Stop seeking differences to squabble over when Britain and Russia have so much in common.