It took the Russian military more than a week to acknowledge that one serviceman died and two dozen others were missing after one of its flagship cruisers sank in the Black Sea, reportedly the result of a Ukrainian missile strike.
The acknowledgment happened after families started searching desperately for their sons who, they said, served on the ship and did not come home, and relatives are posing sharp questions about Russia’s initial statement that the entire crew was evacuated.
The Russian Ministry of Defense on Friday said in a terse announcement that one crew member died and 27 were left missing after a fire damaged the flagship Moskva cruiser last week, while 396 others were evacuated.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The loss of the Moskva, one of three missile cruisers of its kind in Russia’s fleet, was shrouded in mystery from the moment it was first reported early on Thursday last week. Ukraine said it hit the ship with missiles. The Russian defense ministry would not acknowledge an attack, saying only that a fire broke out on the vessel after ammunition detonated, causing serious damage.
Moscow even said that the ship remained afloat and was being towed to a port, only to admit hours later that it sank after all — in a storm.
Only several days later, the Russian military released a short and mostly silent video showing rows of sailors, supposedly from the Moskva, reporting to their command in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
The footage offered little clarity on how many sailors were evacuated to safety.
Soon came the questions. An emotional social media post by Dmitry Shkrebets saying that his son, a conscript who served as a cook on Moskva, was missing, quickly went viral.
The military “said the entire crew was evacuated. It’s a lie! A blatant and cynical lie!” Shkrebets, a resident of Crimea, wrote on VK, a popular Russian social media platform, Sunday last week, three days after the ship went down.
“My son, a conscript, as the very commanders of the Moskva cruiser told me, is not listed among the wounded and the dead and is added to the list of those missing... Guys, missing in the open sea?!” she wrote.
Similar posts quickly followed from other parts of Russia. The Associated Press (AP) found social media posts looking for at least 13 other young men who reportedly served on the Moskva whose families could not find them.
One woman spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, as she feared for her son’s safety.
She said her son was a conscript and had been aboard the Moskva for several months before telling her in early February that the ship was about to depart for drills. She lost touch with him for several weeks after that.
The news about Russia invading Ukraine worried her, she said, and she started reading the news online and on social media every day.
The last time they spoke on the telephone was in the middle of March. He was on the ship, but did not say where it was.
She did not start looking for him until a day after she learned about trouble aboard the Moskva, because official statements from the ministry said the crew was evacuated.
However, no one called or messaged her about her son’s whereabouts and she started to get agitated.
Calls to various military officials and hotlines got her nowhere at first, but she persisted. A call she made on the way to a grocery store brought bleak news — that her son was listed as missing and that there was little chance he survived in the cold water.
“I said: ‘But you said you rescued everyone,’ and he said: ‘I only have the lists.’ I screamed: ‘What are you doing?!’” she told the AP. “I got hysterical, right at the bus stop [where I was standing], I felt like the ground was giving way under my feet. I started shaking.”
The families’ accounts could not be independently verified, but they went largely uncontested by Russian authorities.
Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov said the sinking of the Moskva is a major political blow for Russian President Vladimir Putin, not so much because of the outcry from families, but because it hurts Putin’s image of military might.
“This trait, might, is under attack now, because we’re now talking about the devastation of the fleet,” Gallyamov said.
However, the families’ woes underscores “that one shouldn’t trust the Russian authorities,” he said.
In the meantime, some families with missing sons plan to continue seeking the truth.
“Now we will turn to figuring out for how long one can ‘go missing’ in the open sea,” Shkrebets posted on Friday.
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