The ‘Moskva’, 190 meters long, was one of the cruisers with the most powerful weapons of the Russian Navy.
The Russian ship ‘Moskvá’ (Moscow), flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, is already at the bottom of the sea, next to the Zmeini island (of snakes), 25 nautical miles from the Ukrainian coast. At least this is confirmed by sources from Turkey and Romania cited by several Telegram channels. The head of the Odessa Regional Administration, Maxim Marchenko, assured last night that the Russian cruiser ‘Moskva’ was hit by two Ukrainian Neptun missiles.
“It was exactly where our border guards sent him to Snake Island!” Marchenko stated via Telegram. “The Neptun missiles, guarding the Black Sea, caused very serious damage to the Russian ship,” he stated.
Such information was confirmed by Oleksiy Arestovich, adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine, reporting that “the cruise ship, with a crew of 510 crew members, is currently on fire in the midst of a strong storm.” He added sarcastically that “two sailors smoked in the wrong place, or once again violated some security measures, well, somehow they were out of luck.”
Shortly after, the Russian Ministry of Defense issued a statement admitting that the ship had suffered a “fire” due to a “detonation”. “The ship was seriously damaged, so the crew was completely evacuated. The causes of the fire are being established,” read the military press release distributed by RIA-Nóvosti and other Russian agencies. The very fact of the hasty evacuation of the crew of the ‘Moskva’ led to the belief that the cruiser was sinking. This morning, sources from Turkey and Romania claimed that she completely sank.
This ship, 190 meters long and flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, was one of the cruisers with the most powerful weapons of the Russian Navy. She was equipped with Vulkan and Fort cruise missiles, anti-aircraft rockets, and had powerful anti-ship artillery. She could take a helicopter on board.
It belongs to the ‘1164 Atlant’ project, was built in Soviet times at the Mykolaiv shipyards and launched in 1982. It originally bore the name ‘Slava’ (Glory). She accompanied Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to the 1989 Malta summit with his American counterpart George HW Bush in Malta in 1989. As early as 2000, under the name “Moskva”, she became the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The cruiser participated in the Syrian war. She then she was in repair and modernization for several years. She received several times the visit of President Vladimir Putin.
At the beginning of the current war, the ‘Moskva’ demanded the surrender of the Ukrainian border troops on the Snake Island, which was flatly refused. It was then that the Post Department of Ukraine issued a stamp on which the ship appears and, from the shore, a Ukrainian soldier shows him his fist with his middle finger raised. The members of the border guard unit deployed there were arrested, but later released in a prisoner exchange. The ‘Moskva’ is not the only ship that the Ukrainian forces manage to destroy, on March 24, a month after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, another Russian ship, the ‘Saratov’, was sunk in the port of Berdyansk.
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