Mothers grieve in the home city of stricken submarine

"I can't sit around waiting here any longer," cried Valentina Staroseltseva. "I must go up there." Her 20-year-old son, Dmitry, is on the Kursk, trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

"I can't sit around waiting here any longer," cried Valentina Staroseltseva. "I must go up there." Her 20-year-old son, Dmitry, is on the Kursk, trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

Residents of the city of Kursk, which regularly sends its young men to the Northern Fleet, collected money to help relatives, including Mrs Staroseltseva, to take the 45-hour train ride to Severomorsk, on the Arctic coast yesterday.

But in the end, the government paid for their tickets. The families who could not afford tickets had watched sadly all week as television showed other sailors' relatives gathering in Severomorsk.At least seven came from Kursk, 500km south of Moscow.

Until this tragedy, the city had won a bloody place in history as the site of the world's biggest tank battle, between Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

Mrs Staroseltseva, a nurse, added: "I am angry we did not let the British come sooner.As a mother, I want everything to be done faster and better. I think maybe he [Dmitry] is lying silently. As a mother, I hope he is calm. The main thing is not to panic."

The irony was that Mrs Staroseltseva had been pleased to see Dmitry sent to the prestigious Northern Fleet instead of the notorious stroibat (construction brigade), where bullying is rife, or, worse, to what Russians call the "meat grinder" - Chechnya.

"We thought the submarine was so safe," she said. "We called it our submarine. We were 100 per cent confident in it. We really believed in it."

Dmitry, who graduated with high marks from college, had to compete with other conscripts for a posting on the Kursk.

In his most recent letter home, he enthused about life on the modern, 14,000-tonne pride of the fleet. "It is just like home here. I'm really happy. We have four meals a day, just like home. We will resurface in the middle of August. See you soon."

But Mrs Staroseltseva had a premonition of disaster. She said she felt "ill and out of sorts" on Sunday before the news of the sinking broke. "Then I heard the submarine was lying on the seabed. I understood that something had gone wrong. The only thing that helps me now is to pray."