The Kremlin refused on Tuesday April 19 to comment on testimonies reporting sailors missing since the sinking of the cruiser Moskvathe Russian Black Sea flagship that kyiv says sank last week.
” All information is provided by the Ministry of Defence. We do not have the prerogative to communicate “, declared the spokesman of the presidency Dmitry Peskov, while neither the navy, nor the ministry drew up a balance sheet of the sinking of the boat aboard which were hundreds of crew members.
In recent days, several testimonies published by Russian-language media and on social networks have reported missing sailors, some performing their military service. A man living in Crimea, Dmitry Chkrebets, posing as the father of a missing person, published a message on the social network Vkontakte on Sunday evening asking why his son, a conscript, was in a combat zone. A woman, Yulia Tsyvova, also told several media that her son was missing.
Officially, the Russian fleet claims that the crew of the Moskva was evacuated from the cruiser and reported no deaths, injuries or missing. According to Moscow, this flagship, which played a key role in the coordination of Russian ships in the Black Sea, sank following a fire caused by the explosion of ammunition. Ukraine claims to have sunk it with missiles.
A humiliation for Russia and its fleet
On Saturday, the Russian Ministry of Defense released a video presented as showing a meeting between the head of the navy and dozens of survivors of the cruiser, whose crew could officially count up to 680 men.
The sinking of the Moskva is widely considered as a humiliation for Russia and its fleet, and even pro-Kremlin commentators have demanded explanations from the authorities, without success so far.
On March 25, Russia acknowledged 1,351 dead in its ranks in a month of fighting in Ukraine, an unverifiable report from an independent source which has not been updated since. Also in March, the Kremlin had indicated that conscripts had mistakenly taken part in the offensive in Ukraine, then had been withdrawn from the theater of operations.
(With AFP)
