As Russian media and officials struggled on Friday to explain the sinking of the country’s Black Sea flagship, it was clear that the loss of the cruiser and an untold number of its estimated 510 crew was a blow to Vladimir Putin’s war plans and his military’s prestige.
From the beginning, the Russian government tried to play down what had happened. At first its defence ministry claimed an accident had caused a fire onboard. Then the ministry said the damage had been contained and the ship was being towed to port in Sevastopol. Finally, late on Thursday, the ministry announced that the ship had sunk in “stormy seas”.
But even as commentators on state TV tried to spin the loss of the Moskva as a temporary setback, Russians could understand that something serious had taken place.
Andrei Medvedev, a journalist at the state-run broadcaster VGTRK and a deputy for the Moscow city council, wrote: “The Moskva cruiser is a bad story. Both from a reputational and a military point of view. But is it a catastrophe? No.”
The scale of the loss is yet to be seen. Ukraine claims it struck the Moskva with a Neptune anti-ship missile. No pictures of the Moskva or its crew have been published in Russian media since the ship was damaged. Some western reports suggest just dozens of the estimated 500 crew-members were rescued as the ship went down. Russia has not published any official information about the number of sailors who died.
So unlikely was the loss of the ship in Moscow’s eyes that in 2020 Orthodox Christian officials said it had been designated to carry a piece of the “true cross,” a relic from the wooden cross on which Jesus Christ is said to have been crucified.
At the very least it will strike yet another blow at the image of the Russian military as a professional force carrying out what the Kremlin calls a “special operation” on the territory of Ukraine.
The ship’s sinking was “in sharp contrast with the image of a successfully modernised army promoted by Russian officials and state-owned media, and with the self-confidence with which Russia embarked on this war,” wrote Alexander Baunov, a political analyst.
The loss of the cruiser may not make a crucial difference in Russia’s war plans. The Russian fleet will continue to blockade Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, although it appears that the flotilla has moved further from the coastline in order to prevent another attack. Some less plausible scenarios, such as a Russian amphibious landing near Odesa, appear even more remote now.
Meanwhile, the fighting on the ground continues. Russian pundits claimed that the sinking of the ship was a distraction from Russia’s creeping gains in cities such as Mariupol, where Moscow claims Ukrainian marines have surrendered. The Russian army is pivoting toward an offensive in Ukraine’s east, promising a new chapter in the war that will rely far more on trenches and heavy artillery than the previous months.
But the scale of the losses onboard the Moskva will doubtless shock the Russian public, which has been told repeatedly, like Putin, that the war in Ukraine is going to plan. The sinking is just the latest indication that the conflict will not end soon.
