(See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory Day.)īut Poborchiy is also convinced that Putin is lying. Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends into darkness for nearly two months. At 51, he admires Putin, who may no longer officially run the Kremlin but is assumed to orchestrate the every move of his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Poborchiy nicely captures this incongruity. There is a contradiction here: The people spearheading the memorial are Kremlin loyalists who do whatever Moscow tells them to do, while the memorial they are building appears to conflict with Kremlin interests. (This memorial also mentions the Kursk sailors, but Vitaly Poborchiy, a local businessman and ranking member of the regional branch of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, says townsfolk want a monument dedicated solely to the Kursk.) ![]() Regional governor Dmitry Dmitriyenko pledged his support and the city has set aside a small plot overlooking the harbor and next to another memorial, a lighthouse dedicated to sailors who died in peacetime. 29 town-hall meeting, locals said they wanted it turned into a memorial. tall, sparked a furor in Murmansk at an Apr. The discovery of the cabin, which is painted black and stands about 10 ft. Abramova's father and uncle, like so many men in this city pockmarked with Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and cell-phone billboards, were once submariners. "It was like seeing people who had died," Abramova says, of finding the hulking section that once wrapped around the central nervous system of the 154-ft. 17, after months of searching, Tatyana Abramova, a reporter at the newspaper Murmanskiy Vestnik, happened upon the deck cabin of the Kursk in a dump outside Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle, and a few miles from the headquarters of the Northern Fleet. (See pictures from the mission to recover victims from the Kursk.)īut on Mar. Remembering this sort of self-inflicted tragedy would conflict with Soviet and post-Soviet myth-making about the power and glory of the Russian military. The Kursk went down when one of its torpedoes blew up. ![]() Then President Vladimir Putin waited five days while vacationing on the Black Sea to comment when friends and relatives of the dead unfurled a memorial in Moscow on the second anniversary of the disaster, not a single senior government official attended. 12, 2000, leaving 118 sailors and officers dead. The Kursk’s wreckage was lifted in October 2001, allowing the investigators to retrieve 115 bodies and search the mangled hull for clues about the cause.Follow Russian government has said little about the Kursk nuclear submarine since it sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. The government’s bungled handling of the rescue effort shook the nation and dented President Vladimir Putin’s prestige. After a week, Russia finally invited Norwegian divers and it took them just hours to open the hatch, but by then it was too late to save anyone.Īfter the catastrophe, some navy officials said the crew members who survived the blast might have been alive for three days, but the investigators eventually concluded that all of them died of carbon monoxide poisoning within eight hours of the blasts - long before any help could arrive. The disoriented Russian navy command wasted hours before launching a search, and the authorities turned down offers of Western assistance, stubbornly sending Russian mini-submarines to make repeated futile attempts to hook onto the submarine’s escape hatch. Most of the 118 members of the crew were killed instantly, but as the submarine sank to the bottom of the sea, only about 350 feet (108 meters) below the surface, 23 men were able to flee to a rear compartment, where they waited for help. 12, 2000, after suffering two powerful explosions. ![]() submarines and a British sub were spotted in the area near the Russian naval exercise in the Barents Sea when the Kursk disaster happened. Russian media reports have claimed that two U.S. Popov, who was blamed for his slow and bungled response to the catastrophe as the Northern Fleet’s chief, has made the collision claim before, but his latest statement was more outspoken and detailed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Popov’s claim and pointed to the official probe that concluded that the catastrophe was triggered by an explosive propellant that leaked from a faulty torpedo. He didn’t identify the submarine and acknowledged that he lacks proof to back up his claim. Popov told the state RIA Novosti news agency that the Western submarine was also damaged in the powerful explosion and sent a distress signal from the area.
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