With a length of 186 meters and a crew of 476 sailors and 62 officers, the “Moskva” was already the pride of the Soviet naval forces when she was launched in 1979 in Mykolaiv in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Michael Petersen of the US Navy’s Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI) spoke to the BBC of a “symbol of Russian naval power in the Black Sea”.
In the history of the modern Russian Navy, there are ships that embody far more than a country’s naval power, and “the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet (…) is just such a ship,” writes the Moscow Times, citing information from one Russian military magazine. The cruiser can “rightly be called the backbone of the Russian naval forces in the Black Sea region,” as the 2017 “Militaryarms” article goes on to say.
Putin on board with Kuchma
Commissioned in Soviet times under the name “Slava” (Glory), the ship, which was saved from being scrapped after intervention by the mayor of Moscow, was renamed “Moskva” in 1996 and completely renovated and modernized again between 2018 and 2020. As the third largest ship in the Russian fleet, the nuclear-capable cruiser continued to play a key role at the military level.
The ship was also repeatedly used on a diplomatic level – in December 1989, for example, at a summit meeting off Malta, at which the then General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mikhail Gorbachev, met with US President George Bush due to the weather but met on the cruise ship “Maxim Gorky”.
Shortly after taking office for the first time as Russian President, Vladimir Putin, together with his then Ukrainian counterpart Leonid Kuchma, visited the ship, which was then anchored in Sevastopol, Crimea. As a result, Putin was repeatedly on board the “Moskva” with high-ranking guests. In August 2014, he received Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and, during a visit to Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi outside Sochi.
With “f… you” in the headlines
The ship was used for the first time in an armed conflict in Georgia in August 2008. After Russia intervened in the Syrian war on the side of ruler Bashar al-Assad, the “Moskva” was deployed in the eastern Mediterranean between September 2015 and January 2016.
Since February 24, the missile cruiser has also been involved in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. At the beginning of the conflict, the ship, together with the “Vasily Bykov”, attacked the Ukrainian island of Snakes near the Romanian border. Radio communications with the Ukrainian border guards on the island went viral: When asked to surrender, the border guards, who were arrested after being shot at and have since been released, replied: “Russian warship, f… you”.
“The ‘Moskva’ has been a thorn in the side of the Ukrainians since the beginning of the conflict,” says military analyst Petersen, which is why the sinking now celebrated by Kyiv is “a real morale boost for the Ukrainians”. Russia has now “lost a significant part of its naval capabilities in the Black Sea and its ability to hit targets in Ukraine,” military expert Pavel Luzhin told the Moscow Times.
“Most visible asset in the Ukraine war”
The “Moskva” played a central role in the Ukraine war as a hub for the coordination of sea attacks. CNN talks about Russia’s “most visible asset in the Ukraine war”. The biggest war loss of a naval ship in 40 years should also hit Russian morale hard, as the US broadcaster notes. “It raises questions about the competence of the Navy,” former US Navy Captain Carl Schuster told CNN, and those doubts “reached to the Kremlin.”
Around ten years ago, Russia’s President Putin announced that he wanted to restore the morale and professionalism of the Navy, said Schuster, who, looking at Russia’s further setbacks in the Ukraine war, comes to the conclusion: “It seems that he (Putin, note. ) could not keep any of his promises for any of the Russian military services.”
“Easily 700 million”
Russia has lost thousands of pieces of equipment since invading Ukraine on February 24 – including hundreds of tanks, dozens of planes and the Saratov Landing Ship – the loss of the Moskva is the most expensive so far, according to the US news magazine Newsweek with reference on a listing of the Ukrainian branch of the financial magazine “Forbes”. The editor-in-chief of the Special Operations Forces Report (SOFREP) then also shares the figures mentioned in this context with Newsweek: It “could easily cost 700 million dollars (644 million euros) to replace the ship”.
Remembering Argentina’s “General Belgrano”
According to CNN, a comparable ship was last sunk in 1982 during the Falklands War. The “General Belgrano”, which was torpedoed by a British submarine, was “similar in size” to the “Moskva”, but had a crew of around 1,100 men, which was around twice as large.
A total of 323 people died when the General Belgrano sank. Whether and how many crew members died when the “Moskva” sank is another of many unanswered questions. So far, the Russian Ministry of Defense has only spoken of an evacuation campaign. As well as the number of crew members taken from board, it also remains unclear whether – as is currently widely speculated on the Internet – nuclear weapons were also on board and the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Igor Osipov, was actually deposed and arrested as a result of the “Moskva” sinking became.