After a fire broke out on board the Russian Navy's flagship, the "Moskva," it was at the very least substantially damaged. Ukraine claims that the ship has now gone down with the ocean. According to Russian authorities, the crew was disembarked.
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| Russian navy flagship Moskva/Google Map |
An ammo explosion on board the Russian Black Sea Fleet's flagship resulted in significant damage to the vessel. A fire aboard the guided missile cruiser Moskva resulted in the detonation of ordnance, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, which was reported by the Interfax news agency on Thursday. The whole crew was rescued, and the cause of the incident is still being examined, according to authorities. In normal circumstances, the 11,500-ton ship has a crew of around 500 people on board.
According to Ukrainian reports, the "Moskva" has already sunk, despite efforts to save it. The "Moskva" has gone missing, according to Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who posted a message on Twitter. Maxim Marchenko, the governor of the district around the port city of Odessa, had earlier said in an online post that the ship had been attacked by two Ukrainian Neptun cruise missiles prior to the incident. He did not, however, present any supporting proof. A request for comment from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has not yet been replied to by the ministry.
According to different sources, the missile cruiser was attacked either off the coast of Serpent Island, which Russia had captured, or in the Bay of Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia had annexed in 2014.
Baltic defense minister and deputy prime minister, Artis Pabriks, made the comparison between the likely loss of the Russian battleship Moskva and the loss of the German battleship Bismarck during World War II. The fact that Russia feels embarrassed to educate its citizens "about the successful attack on the flagship and Russia's imperial ideology" is understandable, according to Pabriks.
According to Kiev, the "Moskva" was part in one of the most crucial conflicts at the beginning of the war, when Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island, a tiny promontory in the Black Sea, were assaulted by the ship, which was sunk by the Ukrainian navy. The raid resulted in the capture of 19 Ukrainian marines by the Russians. According to the Ukrainian parliament, they were freed towards the end of March as part of a prisoner swap with Russia that took place earlier that month.
According to Russian news media, the "Moskva," which entered service with the Black Sea Fleet in 1983, is armed with 16 anti-ship cruise missiles of the "Vulkan" type, each of which has a range of at least 700 kilometers, among other things. There are also other weapon systems, including as anti-submarine weapons, that are in use today. It was constructed in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv during the Soviet era. According to TASS, the cruiser and its 510-strong crew were sent to the eastern Mediterranean in 2015 to safeguard the Russian Hmeimim airfield in Syria, which was under attack.