The Kremlin refused to answer mounting questions on Tuesday about the fate of sailors on board its most powerful warship after it was reportedly sunk by Ukrainian missiles last week, claiming it is “not authorized” to do so.
While Ukraine said several crew members on board the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, were killed, Moscow has denied that its ship was downed by Ukraine, claiming it was badly damaged after an “ammunition” fire, and repeatedly insisted that all 500 crew members were safely evacuated before it went down “in a storm.”
Amid numerous reports of Moskva crew members’ families searching for their missing loved ones and publicly mourning dead sailors on social media, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, immediately shut down all questioning on Tuesday. “All communication is only through the Defense Ministry,” he said, adding that “we are not authorized to release anything.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Family members of missing crew members have accused the defense ministry of trying to “hush up” the deaths to prevent further humiliation for the Russian military after several setbacks in Ukraine. According to accounts of family members published on social media and Russian opposition news sites, several of those on board the Moskva were conscripts, a group which Putin had vowed would be excluded from the war in Ukraine.
Among them was 20-year-old Yegor Shkrebets, a military conscript whose father, Dmitry Shkrebets, took to the social media site Vkontakte to blast military leadership for their “brazen and cynical lie” that everyone on board was evacuated.
He said he’d been told directly by commanders that his son was listed as missing without a trace.
“A conscript who is not supposed to be taking part in the war is listed as missing without a trace. You guys, he disappeared without a trace in the open sea?”!!!
“Why are you, the officers, still alive, and my son, a conscript soldier, has died?” he wrote.
“I will devote the rest of my life to making sure the truth will prevail in this story,” he wrote in the since-deleted post.
His wife, Yegor Shkrebets’ mother, told The Insider that she and her husband had visited a military hospital in search of their son and seen about 200 wounded servicemen being treated there.
She said her husband had asked a military commander where their son was, to which he replied: “Well, in the sea somewhere.”
The BBC’s Russian service identified yet another sailor on Tuesday whose mother said she was told he was killed onboard the Moskva.
Tamara Grudinina said her 21-year-old son Sergei Grudinin had been sent onto the ship immediately after training.
Grudinina said she had phoned the Russian Defense Ministry’s hotline for family members right after learning the ship had sunk, and she was told her son was “alive and healthy and would get in touch at the first opportunity.”
But a short time later, a man identifying himself as a commander of the warship contacted her and said her son had “basically sunk together with the ship.”
Read it at Agence France-Presse
