Russia has launched a major salvage operation to the wreck of the Moskva cruiser.
Experts suspect Vladimir Putin ’s navy - humiliated by the sinking of its Black Sea Fleet flagship - aims to raise unexploded missiles and top secret coding devices.
There may be an attempt to bring bodies to the surface.
In the wake of the sinking, Ukrainian sources claimed it was likely nuclear missiles were on the Moskva, but the Pentagon said it had no evidence of this.
A 315ft salvage ship is involved in the operation which Russian sources say is supported by a submarine sent to the site on Friday from naval port Sevastopol.
This comes amid fury from relatives of dozens of sailors “missing without a trace” who Russia has refused to acknowledge as dead.
Putin’s defence ministry said in a new terse statement that one sailor died - midshipman Ivan Vakhrushev - and 27 are missing.
It is unclear if the figure is accurate, but many parents fear the worst and presume their conscript sons are dead.
In the statement, the defence ministry stuck to its line that the ship sank on 14 April due to a fire that damaged the vessel amid ammunition explosions.
Ukraine claims to have sunk the Moskva with two Neptune missile strikes, a version supported by the West.
The world’s oldest warship - the 108-year-old Kommuna salvage vessel, built under the last tsar Nicholas II - is positioned over the blitzed wreck, say reports.
The ship is described as a “floating gantry”, used to winch loads from the sea floor.
The Russians are not seeking to bring up the entire lost warship.
A US defence official, cited by Forbes, said: “That would be an enormous engineering task, to try to bring that ship up to the surface…
“We’ve seen no indication that they have shown any interest in doing that.”
The Forbes report suggested that Russia might be seeking to retrieve "cryptological materials—radios and keys indicating secret codes—as well as any weapons or logs that might be of interest to a foreign power”.
On the possibility of nuclear weapons being on the Moskva, a Pentagon official said: “We have no indications that there were nuclear weapons on board the Moskva when it went down.”
Among names disclosed by relatives as missing and presumed dead after the Moskva sinking are: Nikita Efremenko, 19, from Priozersk, Leningrad region, Andrey Tsyvov, 19, from Crimea, Nikita Syromyasov, 20, from Crimea, Leonid Savin, 18 or 19, from Alupka, Yegor Shkrebets, 20, from Yalta, Mark Tarasov, 24, from St Petersburg, Sergey Grudinin, 21, from Amur region, Danil Gerok, 22, from Lobnya, Moscow region, and Ivan Frantin, 23, from Karelia, and Ivan Kutnyak.
Angry parents have hit out at “lies” and “bullying” by the authorities over their missing conscript sons who Putin had promised would not be sent into the hot war.
Yet they were among the 510-strong crew in the attack on 14 April.
Some relatives have been warned they will not get financial “compensation” for their loved-ones’ deaths if they go to the media.
Despite this, brave Dmitry Shkrebets, father of Yegor Shkrebets, has launched a campaign to force out the truth about what happened to the warship - and their sons - faced with a wall of obfuscation from the Russian authorities.
He has slammed the “lies” and demanded punishment for the “scumbags” who sent the “boys” - forced into compulsory military service - to their deaths.
“All the guilty should be punished for what they did. Or rather, what they didn't do,” he told Current Times.
“Because these boys - 19-20 years old - should not have been there during these operations.
“They should have been landed in Sevastopol.
A week after the sinking one frantic mother, Olesya Dubinina, demanded a rescue operation in the hope her son, Nikita Syromyasov, is still alive, trapped in a sealed air bubble in the wreck.
“We urgently need to start a rescue operation. For sure, when it sank there were still living people - wounded, unconscious. For sure, there are battened down parts of the ship that have not been flooded,” she said.
However, there is not seen to be a realistic hope that survivors will be found.
The warship’s First Rank Captain Anton Kuprin, 44, was among the survivors, it is understood.
There are reports Vice-Admiral Igor Osipov, commander of the Black Sea Fleet, was detained in the wake of the sinking.
