New Delhi, June 10 -- The building was still smouldering when Dmitry Peskov walked to a microphone. The Kremlin's spokesman had a promise to make.

proof, Peskov said, of Moscow's righteousness in what he called its "struggle for the Russian regions."

There was just one complicating fact. The museum had already said, quietly, that the original Roubaud was never in the building.

In a statement released hours after the fire was extinguished, the museum said all 39 surviving fragments of Franz Roubaud's original 1905 panorama canvas were stored elsewhere at the time of the strike. "What was inside the building was a canvas painted in 1954 by a group of Soviet artists," the museum said. The original pieces - the shards of the painting that ...